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[[ VeryUseful Records ]]

The system of record
you actually own.

One system that holds your organisation's documents, the steps people follow to produce them, and the proof of who did what, in a single file you own outright. The work and the evidence of the work stop being two different jobs.

The problem

Twenty years of shared drive

Most organisations do not have a records problem they can see. They have a folder nobody prunes, a spreadsheet that became a system, and three people who know where the current version lives. It works until someone asks you to prove something.

"If your underlying records are a mess, your AI will confidently synthesise garbage. That's not the AI's fault. That's the corpus."

[[ Which version ]]

Four copies of the same document, and the newest one isn't the right one.

[[ Who approved it ]]

The approval happened in an inbox, and the inbox belongs to someone who left.

[[ Kept forever ]]

Nothing is ever thrown away, because nobody can say what may be.

[[ Locked in ]]

Your history sits in a format only the vendor can read, and the price goes up each year.

[[ What you get ]]

What it does for the business

Your people record the work as they do it. The proof is what's left behind afterwards.

Your records are yours

If you ever leave, you keep all of it. The whole thing is one file you hold, not an account on somebody else's service.

One place instead of six

One place instead of the shared drive, the email chains and six spreadsheets.

Nothing in it is silent

Every document shows who changed it, when, and to what. "Who signed this off?" is a ten-second answer instead of an afternoon.

Kept for as long as the law says

Every document is classified the moment it is saved, with the retention it needs already on it. Nothing sits unlabelled for twenty years.

Nothing changes unless a person says so

Suggestions arrive in one inbox showing exactly what would change and why. Approving it applies the change under your name, with the reasoning kept.

Ask in plain words, get your own answer

Ask a question and the answer comes back out of your own documents, with the ones it used shown. It reads your records, not the open internet.

Change how the work is done without calling a programmer

Describe the change in plain language and review it before it takes effect.

It meets people where they are

The same document can be shown action-first, as a short summary, or in full, including a dyslexia-friendly typeface, so the person who hates computer systems is not fighting it.

[[ Built today ]]

Not a slide deck

Anyone can claim a platform exists. These are the things you can check.

  • A food manufacturer's entire compliance operation was built on it without changing the platform underneath.
  • It runs its own documentation: the user, developer and admin guides are installed inside it as a searchable set of pages.
  • We test its own guards by breaking them: take the protection out, confirm the tests fail, put it back.
  • The automated test suite runs with no AI service and no internet connection at all. 833 checks at the most recent run.
  • It is running day to day on our own machines, and we use it to run our own business.

The worked example

VeryUseful Food

The first thing built on Records is a complete compliance system for New Zealand food manufacturers: deliveries checked in at the door, every batch guided step by step, a batch that can't be released when its ingredients don't match its label, and a recall that answers "who has it" in minutes.

It was built entirely out of documents, with no change to the platform underneath. That is the argument for Records: your way of working gets configured, not programmed.

[[See VeryUseful Food]]

[[ Who it's for ]]

Organisations that have to prove things

  • You answer to a regulator or an auditor, and the evidence has to be findable on the day they ask
  • Ten to a hundred staff, with work that crosses several people and currently moves through inboxes and spreadsheets
  • You want to put AI to work on your own knowledge, and you've worked out that the records have to be sorted first
  • You're coming off an ageing in-house system and want the history to come with you, not be left behind

[[ The next step ]]

Start with a conversation

Twenty minutes, no pitch. Tell us what you have to prove and to whom, and we'll tell you honestly whether this is the right thing for you, including when it isn't.

It's in development, and we're looking for our first founding organisations.

Start a conversation

Very Useful Technology Limited, Horowhenua.
[email protected]