record keeping
Maintaining written accounts
Record keeping is the practice of maintaining systematic documentation—of transactions, events, decisions, or other information worth preserving.
Good record keeping enables accountability, supports memory, and satisfies legal or regulatory requirements.
The term appears in contexts from personal finance to medical practice: The IRS requires seven years of record keeping for tax purposes.
Also spelled recordkeeping or record-keeping.
- registersRecords officially
- documentationWritten proof or instructions
- ledgerFinancial record book
- double entryAccounting requiring offsetting records
- vital statisticsPopulation movement records
birth certificate · journal · data · compliance · transactions · provenance · archive · accounting · logbook · chain of custody · categorization · cataloging · entries · filing · paperwork · paper pusher · folders · minutes
- data processingnormalization, data entry, standardization, encoding, scaling
- FFAFFA, chapter meetings, SAE, national convention, state convention
- Lab Operationslab manager, lab technician, lab safety, lab equipment, lab notebooks
- RegTechAML, beneficial ownership, identity verification, audit trails, risk management
- servicescleaning services, streaming, delivery services, salon, bellhop
- bureaucracybureaucracy, bureaucrat, bureaucrats, red tape, civil service
record keepingoff-the-books
Unrecorded for tax purposes
erasure · document shredding · oral tradition · handshake deals · covering tracks
record keepingword of mouth
Information passed through conversation
hearsay · oral tradition · oral history · forgetting · amnesia
record keepingdisorganization
Absence of systematic arrangement
negligence · unaccountability · lack of transparency · data destruction · chaos