How do you run a document circuit in a company?
A good circuit has three elements: a registered document, clear steps and a deadline for every step.
Short answer
- You start from the registered document: without a registration number there is no circuit.
- You define the steps — who receives it, who reviews it, who approves it, who archives it.
- Every step has a deadline and a named person in charge, not an entire department.
- At the end, the document goes into the archive, with its full approval history.
What the law says (in brief)
- The national archive law: the document must be retrievable and handed over to the archive at the end of the circuit, with its retention period set.
- The law on documents in electronic form: the approval history is part of the document kept in electronic form.
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679: access along the circuit is granted only to the people involved in that step, not the whole company.
- Financial-accounting documents that pass through the circuit remain subject to the national retention periods for accounting records.
Practical examples
- Incoming invoice: registry → check by the person in charge of procurement → payment approval → archive, with a total deadline of 5 business days.
- Leave request: direct manager (1 day) → HR (1 day) → personnel file.
- Internal decision: drafting → legal review (2 days) → approval by the administrator → communication to departments.
- A delivery note reaches the warehouse and procurement at the same time, on two parallel branches of the circuit.
Common mistakes
- The circuit lives on email, so nobody knows who currently has the document.
- Steps have no deadline, and documents sit stuck for weeks.
- Approval is asked of a group, not a person, and responsibility becomes diffuse.
- The approved document stays on one person's desk and never reaches the archive.
- There is no delegation for periods of leave, so the circuit stops.
How 4docs helps
- Configurable circuits by document type, with sequential or parallel steps.
- A deadline and alert for every step, plus a report of delayed documents.
- Delegation to a replacement when the person in charge is absent, with each decision recorded under the replacement's name.
- Archiving at the end of the circuit, with the approval history attached to the document.
If the document circulating is a contract that also needs to be signed digitally, use the dedicated product in the ecosystem: 4mycontracts.net