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Skills / Working / Find your missing records

Working Running a business skill

Find your missing records

Compare the records a business actually keeps against the documents its published operating model lists, and produce a gap list with an owner for each gap.

Produce a checked list of records the business should hold and does not.

When to use

  • Use when work cannot be reconstructed after the fact from what was written down.
  • Use before a handover, an audit, a financing round, or a sale.
  • Never copy customer, patient, or employee records into the working notes. Reference them by name and location only.

Procedure

  1. Find the business type at https://smbwiki.com/ and open its page.
  2. List the documents named against each skill. These are the records the published type expects.
  3. For each document, ask where the real equivalent lives, who writes it, and who reads it.
  4. Mark each as kept, kept somewhere nobody can find, kept inconsistently, or not kept.
  5. For anything not kept, record what decision or dispute it would settle if it existed.
  6. Rank the gaps by what they cost when the record is missing, not by how easy they are to fix.
  7. Assign one owner and one location per gap, and agree the first record to start keeping this week.