What Is a Record

Definition

A record is information created or received in the course of business and kept as evidence of an activity, a decision or an obligation. Not every document is a record: a draft, a personal note, a duplicate copy and a piece of reference material are documents. A signed contract, an approved policy, a board minute, an invoice, a personnel file, an accident report and an inspection certificate are records.

The distinction matters because records carry obligations — they must be retained for defined periods, kept accessible and authentic, and disposed of properly — while documents can simply be deleted when they are no longer useful. Treating everything as a record produces unmanageable volume; treating nothing as a record produces the situation where a certificate cannot be found during an inspection.

Qualities of a good record

• Authentic — it is what it purports to be, created by who it says.
• Reliable — it accurately represents what happened.
• Complete and unaltered — its integrity can be demonstrated.
• Usable — it can be located, retrieved and read for as long as it is needed.

The fourth is the one most often lost: a record held in a file format nobody can open, on media nobody has a reader for, or in a system that has been decommissioned, has effectively been destroyed.

Why records management matters

• Legal and regulatory — many records must be kept for defined periods, and failure to produce them is treated as though the activity did not happen.
• Evidence — in disputes, claims, investigations and audits, the organisation with the better records is in a much stronger position.
• Efficiency — time spent searching for information is a substantial and invisible cost.
• Continuity — knowledge that exists only in someone’s head or personal drive leaves with them.
• Risk — keeping information longer than necessary increases exposure in a breach and in disclosure, and in many data protection regimes it is itself a breach.

The lifecycle

1. Create or receive — capture it into the system with appropriate metadata.
2. Use — access, share and maintain it.
3. Maintain — keep it secure, accessible and intact.
4. Dispose — destroy securely, or transfer to permanent archive, when the retention period ends.

Most organisations manage the first three adequately and never do the fourth, which is why shared drives contain twenty years of accumulated material and nobody can find anything.

Who is responsible

Everyone who creates records is responsible for filing them properly. A records manager or administrator maintains the framework — the file plan, the retention schedule and the standards — but cannot file other people’s work for them. Systems that depend on one person tidying up after everyone else fail as soon as that person is busy.