A not-for-profit delivering community services from four sites held fourteen years of client files: partly paper, partly scanned to a shared drive whose folder names only one coordinator could navigate. Funding agreements required evidence of client interactions going back years; finding one file routinely took an afternoon, and audits meant weeks of preparation by temporary staff.
The difficulty
The organisation’s records were sensitive, so access control could not be an afterthought — different programs had different confidentiality boundaries, and the shared drive treated everyone as an administrator. Retention obligations pointed in two directions: funder requirements to keep, privacy obligations to destroy on schedule. The paper archive at two sites had never been indexed at all, so nobody knew its true size.
Project snapshot
- SectorCommunity Services
- Modules deployedInsight Docs, Insight Flow
- Duration16 weeks, plus a scheduled scanning backlog
- Written up withClient permission; identifying detail removed
Numbers quoted in this study were measured by the client before and after the change — they are not our estimates. Where a figure could not be measured cleanly, it has been left out rather than rounded flatteringly.
What we changed
We began with a records workshop that produced a single classification scheme across all four sites, mapped to funder and privacy obligations, with disposal schedules ending in a human review step. Bulk scanning ran site by site with OCR on every page; the backlog was prioritised so the current year went live first, historical files followed on a schedule the coordinators controlled. Insight Flow took over the funding-report workflow: client interactions are now logged to the file by the caseworker at the point of service, and the quarterly evidence report assembles itself. Access permissions were rebuilt per program, with audit logging on every retrieval.
The results
- Any client file retrievable in seconds by the staff member authorised to see it.
- Quarterly funding evidence reports assembled in a day instead of three weeks.
- The full paper backlog indexed and disposed on schedule, with a signed decision trail.
- Audit preparation reduced to a permissions check.
The classification scheme was designed by the coordinators in the workshop, and staff adopted it from the first week.
If your organisation looks like this one
For records projects in sensitive settings, start with a classification workshop and let the people who handle the files design the scheme. Prioritise the current year before the historical backlog. Use permission control at file level and a human decision before anything is destroyed.
To see how a project like this would run against your own calendar and numbers, ask us for a written quote — Records projects are sized mainly by scanning volume; a fifteen-minute call can put a number on yours.