How to Keep Approved Company Facts Current Without Losing Their History

The press kit still calls the new chief operating officer an operations director, six weeks after the appointment. The reporter who interviewed the COO noticed before anyone on the account did. The old title was correct once, and nothing in the fact library said when it stopped being correct.

Keep each reusable fact as a record with its entity, scope, period, source passage and owner. Review it when the event that would change it happens, not on one fixed calendar. When it changes, record the old and new wording side by side, retire the old one from present-tense use without deleting it, and trace the change into every draft that used it. The W3C's provenance model↗ and the Dublin Core metadata terms↗ describe the same discipline for data in general.

Take a fictional monthly review. at a monthly knowledge review, three reusable facts are due: an executive title after a promotion, the regions where a service is currently available, and the company's founding date. They should not receive the same action merely because the calendar reminder arrived on one day.

The reviewer needs the entity and scope of each fact, its relevant period, evidence, owner and permitted uses. The monthly record ends with an explicit disposition: renew, revise, retire or hold. That decision preserves the earlier wording and explains what current drafts may use.

The approved wording, the entity and scope it describes, the period it covers, its source passage, the owner who decided and where it may be used.

Start with an actual draft and its supporting documents. Select the assertions likely to recur, such as service locations, an executive's current title or the scope of an established program. Avoid asking colleagues to populate an elaborate library before they can submit a brief. Capture useful facts as part of the work, with explicit review before they become reusable; a new client can be brought into an evidence-led workflow through its first real deliverable. When the source is an annual or sustainability report, an evidence packet drawn from the long report gives each fact a page to point to.

Keep task instructions, factual evidence and writing examples distinguishable. An instruction to emphasize national reach does not prove coverage. A prior speech can guide a person's style while containing facts that now need checking. Attach the person's approved voice guidance and the organization's approved facts and policy to their respective owners, so an edit to one does not silently change the other. Where terms such as active customer or region tend to drift between documents, a small claims glossary keeps every record using the same definitions.

For each factual record, retain the approved wording, entity, relevant scope, source version, page or passage, period described, decision owner and permitted uses. Add a review trigger or review date where useful. If the effective date is unknown, record it as unknown and ask for clarification. An upload timestamp records receipt; it cannot establish when the business fact became true, which is why the upload date and the fact date belong in separate fields. Metadata standards draw the same line: the Dublin Core metadata terms define separate properties for the date a resource was submitted, the date it was changed and the date, often a range, of its validity¹.

Give each due fact one of four dispositions (renew, revise, retire or hold) based on its evidence, not on the day the reminder fired.

The following three records are a fictional maintenance example. The people, documents and dates are invented to show the decisions involved.

Executive title: an approved biography still calls Amira Shah operations director, while the signed appointment notice records her as chief operating officer from September 15. The authorized owner revises the current entry from that effective date and retires the old title from present-tense use. Earlier releases keep their historical wording and source links.

Service availability: a roadmap proposes two additional regions, while the current service register confirms bookings only in the existing regions. The owner holds the expansion wording until operational status and public-use permission are confirmed. Current drafts keep the narrower approved statement; the roadmap remains a plan rather than evidence that launch occurred.

Founding date: the dated incorporation record still supports the approved wording, no contrary evidence appears and the owner confirms its permitted uses. The reviewer renews that entry without inventing a new effective date or rewriting its history. The three rows therefore show revise and retire, hold, and renew as distinct maintenance decisions.

A retirement has an effective time, and drafts on either side of it are treated differently. In a second fictional case, a company that has described seven customer workshops closes one at 18:00 on April 17, and the internal transition plan that confirms it stays restricted until staff have been told. The owner records the retirement boundary and holds the new public wording until communications clears it. Drafts scheduled before the closure can use seven only when their publication and intended meaning fit the confirmed period. Drafts going live after it are flagged, and templates stop offering the old present-tense line at the effective time.

A retired fact was true within a known scope and has reached its end; a wrong one was never supported. They lead to different actions.

Give each record a status as well as a value: current, pending change, retired or disputed. A retired record should no longer be offered for present-tense drafting. It should retain its approved wording, scope, effective period, source passage, decision owner, public-use conditions and links to earlier uses.

Retirement is different from rejection. A rejected proposal never gained the required approval. A disputed fact has unresolved evidence. A retired fact was usable within a known scope and has reached an end boundary. Keeping those states separate helps future reviewers understand whether the old statement was wrong or simply old. The difference decides what follows: the PRSA Code of Ethics↗ asks practitioners to act promptly to correct erroneous communications they are responsible for², while an outdated but once accurate line may need no more than a clear date.

With a three-part note: what was approved, what is proposed and what the owner decided, keeping the old entry intact.

The W3C describes provenance as information about the entities, activities and people involved in producing a piece of data, which can be used to assess its quality, reliability or trustworthiness³. A fact record needs only a small part of that idea: what the fact was, what replaced it, who decided and on what evidence. Dublin Core even has a term for the link between the two entries, Is Replaced By, for a resource that supersedes another¹. The three-part note below keeps that link readable for a writer.

What was previously approved

Template: [old wording], describing [entity, service, scope and period], supported by [source version and passage]. Approved by [owner] on [decision date] for [permitted audience and use]. Used in [linked drafts or issued materials]. Keep this record intact when a replacement is accepted, so an earlier publication can still be understood against its original evidence.

What is being proposed

Template: [new wording], supported by [new source version and passage], effective [confirmed date or unknown]. Difference from the old entry: [changed value, definition, scope, period or permission]. Proposed by [person or tool]. Evidence check: [what the source establishes and what remains unresolved]. A tool's suggested replacement should remain a proposal until the assigned person decides.

What the owner decided

Template: [accept replacement, keep both with separate scopes, reject proposal or hold for clarification]. Decision by [authorized owner] at [time], because [reason]. Public-use decision: [permitted, restricted or pending], with [conditions]. Affected drafts: [identifiers and next actions]. For a retirement, add: Do not use for [present and future contexts]. Retain for [historical or audit contexts] under [access and permission conditions]. Record any rejected proposal too, so the same ambiguous brochure does not restart the argument without new evidence.

QuoteIt treats a change to a stored fact the same way. The update is an explicit old-and-new decision by a person: the earlier wording and its source stay on record, and nothing replaces them until someone accepts the change. In a draft, each claim sits beside the passage it came from, so a reviewer can see which version of a fact a sentence relied on. If your team keeps company knowledge in a general writing platform, how QuoteIt compares with Writer covers how each handles a fact that changes.

Each one gets an action (revise, revalidate, hold, leave as historical or correct), starting with unpublished and evergreen copy.

When a fact changes, search active releases, spokesperson answers, authored articles and reusable descriptions for the affected wording and meaning. Exact text search is a starting point. A draft may say "across all our locations" and depend on the same scope without repeating the city count. Include answers prepared for journalists in the search, since they are often reused without a second look. Review surrounding paragraphs and the sources those drafts consumed. Give each affected item an action: revise, revalidate, hold, leave as historical or correct. The work can expand quickly, so take unpublished material and current evergreen copy before historical archives.

For an unfinished draft, flag the affected assertions and ask its owner to revise them or recheck them claim by claim. A changed source can invalidate an earlier check even when the sentence stays the same. If a client already accepted the draft, return material changes through the client approval route. Keep the accepted earlier version available alongside the revision.

For issued material, decide whether the old wording was accurate for its stated period or whether it was wrong when published. A historical fact can remain accurate as history. The BBC's guidance on removing online content↗ starts from the same place: content that was accurate when published is normally left in place, because new facts that did not exist at the time do not make the original inaccurate; where leaving out the new facts would be misleading and unfair, the content should usually be updated, and any amendment made openly⁴. A current company description may need updating, and an error may require a correction to the statement already sent through its communications owner. Official statisticians keep the same distinction. The UK Code of Practice for Statistics↗ separates scheduled revisions, planned changes that add data unavailable at first publication, from corrections of errors made in producing or communicating statistics⁵, and asks producers to release both transparently, being clear about the nature and scale of the change⁶. Preserve the original release record while documenting the action taken.

As often as each fact can change: on the event that would change it, such as an appointment or a closure, with calendar reviews only where no reliable event exists.

Use event triggers for facts likely to change: a closure, an appointment, a launch or product withdrawal, a reporting update or revised method, a policy change or an owner's correction. Add periodic reviews where a dependable event signal is unavailable. A calendar review may reveal a stale fact, but the decision to retire it still needs evidence and authority. A long-established founding date needs a different maintenance rhythm from current service availability. Agree on the cadence with the fact owner instead of applying one expiry period to every record.

Keep an escalation route for an overdue review, a withdrawn source or a permission change. When the owner is a busy client contact, a specific request for the missing evidence gets a faster answer than a general reminder. Hold affected current-use claims while the issue is unresolved. Preserve earlier evidence and decisions within the team's authorized retention and access arrangements. The writer opening tomorrow's draft should see what remains usable, what needs a decision and why an older version still exists.

The end of a project is a useful trigger too. Closing a project with reusable knowledge moves its checked facts and open questions into the record, and a pass through research that never made it into a draft can surface facts worth keeping, each with its own review.