Key takeaways
  • A defensible record is attributable, contemporaneous, complete and retrievable. Most frontline records fail on the first or the third.
  • Attribution does not require an account. A per-person link records who completed a check as reliably as a login, and more reliably than a shared device.
  • Completeness is the property people forget: the record must show what was skipped, not only what was done.
The four properties
Attributable, contemporaneous, complete, retrievable

Lose any one and the record stops being evidence. A photo in a chat is contemporaneous but not attributable or complete. A register written up at the end of the week is complete but not contemporaneous. A folder on a shared drive is none of them once the person who maintained it leaves.

Attributable

The record must name the person, not the device or the team. This is where shared tablets fail: eleven people, one account, no answer to who took the reading.

An account is one way to get attribution, but not the only one. A check sent to a named person as a link records that person on submission, without them creating credentials, and it is stronger than a shared login.

Contemporaneous

Recorded at the time, not reconstructed afterwards. The gap between doing the work and writing it down is where accuracy goes, and a system timestamp on submission is what closes it. Beware anything that lets a whole week be filled in on a Friday.

Complete

This is the property most often missed. A record of what was done says nothing about what should have been done and was not. A defensible system knows the check had eleven items, that nine were completed, and that two were skipped and by whom.

The same applies at the schedule level: a missed check must appear as a missed check, not as silence.

Retrievable

Findable months later by somebody who was not involved, and exportable without a developer. If answering a question requires scrolling a chat thread or knowing which folder a person used, the record exists but the evidence does not.

Putting it together without a login

These four properties are usually presented as an argument for giving everyone an account. They are not. Sending each check to a named person as a link gives you attribution and a submission timestamp; defining the check gives you completeness; storing it centrally gives you retrieval. The person doing the work installs nothing and remembers no password, and the record is stronger than the shared-device alternative it replaces.