In most organisations a document arrives by email, gets saved somewhere by whoever opened it, and is never seen again. The fix is not more discipline. It is a path that does not allow the shortcut.

Records in this system move through three stages: intake, processing, and output. Nothing is filed directly into its final home. Everything arrives in intake, is classified and checked in processing, and only then reaches the folder where it will live. The person doing the work does not have to remember the rule, because the rule is the only route available.

Intake is deliberately a holding area, not a graveyard. A sweep runs on a 90-day cycle so that anything left sitting in intake is surfaced rather than quietly forgotten. If material is piling up there, that is a signal about workload or ownership, and it is better read than hidden.

Approval is an object, not a label. It is common to see systems where a document is marked approved by editing a status field, which means anyone who can edit can approve. Here the approval record itself is authoritative, and the status tag follows it. If the two ever disagree, the approval object wins.

The result is a record you can defend later. Not because someone remembered to be careful, but because the path through the system left a trail that can be read without asking anyone's permission.