01
The aim of the audit
Before choosing a new filing system or property platform, establish what your inbox already contains. The purpose of this audit is not to organise everything in thirty minutes. It is to map the recoverable history and identify the searches that currently take the most effort.
Choose two representative properties: one with a long history and one added recently. Comparing them will reveal whether the problem is volume, inconsistency or missing sources.
02
Search by property address
Begin with the full address, then common abbreviations and the postcode. Note the senders, document types and repeated subject lines that appear. Do not download every result; record the broad categories and obvious gaps.
- Purchase, mortgage and insurance correspondence
- Tenancy agreements, renewals and notices
- Certificates, inspections and related appointments
- Contractor quotes, invoices and completion notes
- Service charges, utilities and managing-agent correspondence
03
Search by the people around the property
Address searches do not find everything. Contractors, agents, brokers and insurers may use a shortened address or omit it entirely. Search the names of the people and businesses most closely connected with each property.
This step reveals relationships across the portfolio. The same heating engineer, insurer or managing agent may be part of several property histories even when the messages were never filed together.
04
Count recoverable document types
Estimate how many useful documents are available for each category and whether the original email context is intact. Exact counts are less important than identifying where history is strong and where the record depends on another system or paper archive.
- Clearly identifiable and attached to an email
- Present but named ambiguously
- Mentioned in correspondence but not attached
- Stored outside email with no obvious link
- Not found during the audit
05
Write down five real questions
The quality of an organisation system is best measured by the questions it can answer. Write five questions you have genuinely needed to resolve in the last year, then record how many searches and systems each answer requires today.
- When was the last repair of a particular type?
- Which document supports a tenancy or insurance date?
- How much did a contractor invoice for a completed job?
- Which properties have records of a given certificate type?
- What happened immediately before or after a key event?
06
Turn the findings into an organisation brief
At the end of the audit, you should know which addresses, senders and document types represent most of the portfolio history. Use that map as the brief for any manual migration or automated reconstruction.
A suitable system should reduce repeated searching, organise information by property, retain the original source and make the final record understandable to somebody other than the person who created it.
See the workflow
Your property history is already in your inbox.
Explore a working Tenura portfolio built from realistic email, documents, contractors and maintenance history.