Records review loop
- Industry term
A records review loop is a repeating check of your saved records, on a schedule or when something changes, that asks whether each is still current, supported, and needed, then updates, replaces, or retires it.
Saved records go stale silently. The world changes and the note stays as written. Nobody rereads a note that seems to work, so without a set trigger a stale one stays until something goes wrong because of it.
Where you’ll meet it
Your assistant drafts invoice emails from the notes you keep on each client. One client changed their billing contact in May and said so in an email. The note still names the old contact, and this month's invoice draft is addressed to someone who has left the company.
What to do
Correct the note, then set the assistant a standing job. Whenever a client emails, it should compare the message with that client's note and flag any difference for you to confirm. You stay the one who changes a record.
Easy to mix up
| Records review loop | Reviewed record |
|---|---|
| The rule or calendar entry that starts each round of checks | One record's note of who checked it, against what, and when |
Check yourself
Your assistant answers coworkers' questions from a note on the office's opening hours. Each month, a review has the assistant reread every note and confirm that each still reads as correct. The hours changed last week. Will this month's review catch it?
Go deeperMark old records superseded, and archive the ones nobody uses
Marking a record superseded, with a link to the one that replaced it, keeps the history that explains an old answer, which deleting it would lose. An assistant told to read only active records skips the old version, while anyone tracing a past mistake can still see what the record said and when it changed.
An unused record causes no visible error, and it is still one more the assistant can pick by mistake, so archiving notes nobody has opened in a year, or notes for work that has ended, leaves fewer wrong matches for each question.