The Business Data Inventory: A Worksheet for Taking Stock of Your Records

Most owners and operations leads have a rough sense that their business has "a lot of documentation". Very few have a list. That gap matters, because nearly every later question depends on knowing what exists: whether a buyer would be interested, whether you are allowed to share it, and who inside the business has to agree.

An inventory is not a valuation and it is not an audit. It is a plain list of the kinds of records your business creates by doing its work, where they live, who looks after them and what limits apply. You can build one without special software, and it is worth having even if you never take the idea any further, because it also shows you where your knowledge is written down and where it only lives in people's heads.

Buyers describe what they are interested in in their own words, and descriptions differ from one to the next. Published descriptions commonly mention operational documentation such as standard operating procedures, knowledge bases, CRM data, project histories and quality-assurance processes. Treat that as an illustration of the kind of material that gets discussed, not a checklist that every buyer shares.

For the purposes of an inventory, it helps to sort what you have into six families:

Do not worry about getting the sorting perfect. Its purpose is to make sure you look in every corner of the business, not just the obvious place where the SOPs live.

Step 1: Walk the departments

Ask each team lead one question: "What do we write down, and where?" Operations, finance, customer support, delivery, HR and sales all create records. Do not skip the teams that seem unglamorous. Support and operations often hold the most detailed written process knowledge.

Step 2: List the systems

Note where each family of record lives: shared drives, wikis, project tools, CRM, ticketing, messaging platforms, email. A record in a system you do not control, such as a client's portal, is probably not yours to discuss at all.

Step 3: Fill in the worksheet

Use the worksheet below, one row per record family per system. Fill it in quickly and mark anything you are unsure about as "unsure" rather than guessing.

Step 4: Triage into green, amber and red

Once the rows are filled in, give each one a colour. This is a working label for your own planning, not a legal clearance.

Step 5: Write down what you do not know

Finish with a short list of open questions: which contracts need reading, which records might contain personal data, who owns the work that contractors produced. That list is what you take to an adviser. It turns an open-ended "can we do this?" into a specific set of questions.

Copy this into a spreadsheet or print it. One row per record family per system.

• "We wrote it, so we can share it." Authorship is not the only question. A client contract may restrict what you can disclose about work you did for them, even in general terms.
• "We removed the names, so it is anonymous." The ICO's anonymisation guidance treats identifiability as a spectrum and asks whether someone could be identified using means reasonably likely to be used, including by a motivated person with outside information. Taking out names is a start, not a finish. See the ICO's anonymisation guidance.
• Forgetting who created it. Work produced by contractors or freelancers may not automatically belong to you. Check what your agreements with them actually say.
• Forgetting version history and attachments. A clean-looking document can carry old comments, tracked changes or embedded files with names and figures in them.
• Mixing record families. A single "process guide" that quotes real customer cases is part procedure and part client data. Treat the strictest part as the rating for the whole.
• Skipping sign-off. Compiling an inventory is harmless. Approaching anyone outside the business is not something an individual should do without authority.

1. Take the amber and unsure rows to whoever advises you on contracts and data protection. The shorter and more specific your list, the cheaper and faster that conversation is.
2. Get a named person with authority to agree that exploring this is worth doing. A short memo is usually enough. There is a template in Can You Share It?.
3. Check each buyer's published criteria against your size, location, language and record types. Criteria differ and change, so read each buyer's own page.
4. Only then decide whether to enquire.

You never need to send us the inventory. Our check asks only high-level questions about your company, and we do not accept files, documents or database exports. If you are weighing up whether it is worth continuing, the free eligibility check takes a couple of minutes.