What is the best practice for indexing corporate documents?

There are many strategies for indexing documents. In Athento, indexing is carried out using Forms and their Fields (metadata).

It is possible to use multiple forms that correspond to the types of documents we work with (contracts, simple notes, ID cards, deeds, etc.). For each of these forms, we can define fields that contain specific information about these documents. For example, for a simple note, we may want to store the cadastral reference number.

However, it is not always possible to define forms for all types of documents that are handled within a company. In addition, there is usually information that we want to store for all the documents of the company. If these circumstances arise, a good strategy is to use a canonical form.

Canonical form

A canonical form is a form that contains general information that allows us to catalog and find any document in the organization. Depending on the client's business, the fields of a canonical form may vary, but to give an example, some fields that a canonical form might contain would be:

• Date of origin of the document
• Origin of
• Type of document
• The process to which it belongs
• Effective end date
• Location
• Case number / Contract number / Customer number / Product, etc.

The idea of having this form is to guarantee that all the documentation in the document manager contains a minimum amount of information that allows it to be quickly located and exploited. In other words, it is the common set of metadata for all types of documents and it will be the template that will be applied to all types of content.

In general, there is usually a canonical form for records and a canonical form for simple documents, although it is possible to work with only one form for everything.

The canonical form:

• simplifies and facilitates the consultation and retrieval of documents.
• allows documents to be uploaded quickly, as there is no need to indicate specific forms when uploading the documentation.
• is highly recommended when also working with integrations with other applications.

Other strategies

Another indexing strategy that can be followed in Athento is to use different forms to store the different document entities, but all forms contain a minimum set of fields to describe and retrieve any document.

Athento allows having a library of fields that can be reused in all forms.

This practice allows us to store general information for all documents and particular information depending on the typology of the entities.

The choice of the best strategy will depend on the business needs, in any case, there should always be mandatory minimum fields or metadata to describe the corporate documentation.