Document management best practices
The point of putting documents into UniAsset is not storage. It is knowing before something expires.
Decide where each document belongs
Two homes, one question: what are you actually tracking — the document, or the thing it describes?
| The document is the thing | Use |
|---|---|
| An operating licence with a renewal date | Document Asset |
| A professional certification | Document Asset |
| A site-wide fire safety certificate | Document Asset |
| The document is evidence about an asset | Use |
|---|---|
| A purchase invoice | Attachment on that asset |
| A warranty certificate | Attachment |
| A service manual | Attachment |
Full comparison: Document Assets vs attachments.
Always set the expiry date
This is the single most important habit.
A certificate uploaded without an expiry date is a file in a folder. With one, UniAsset warns you ahead of the date and again once it has passed — which is what turns storage into compliance tracking.
Set expiry dates on:
- Warranties
- Insurance certificates
- Compliance and inspection certificates
- Licences and permits
- Calibration certificates
Title documents so they can be found
"scan_0047.pdf" is unfindable in six months.
Title it for what it is and what it covers: "Warranty certificate — 3 years from March 2026", "LOLER inspection — annual".
Use the document type
Licence, insurance, warranty, compliance, invoice, manual, certificate, other. Setting it consistently makes the compliance report far more useful than a flat list.
Do not attach site-wide documents to one asset
A certificate covering the whole site filed against one pump only surfaces when someone opens that pump.
If it is not about one asset, make it a document asset.
Watch your storage
Uploads count against your plan's quota — 500 MB on Nova, 5 GB on Orbit, 50 GB on Odyssey, unlimited on Cosmos.
Storage fills fastest through images. A phone photo of an A4 page can be several megabytes; a scanned PDF of the same page is a fraction of that. Scan rather than photograph where you can.
Archive rather than delete. Archiving a document frees its quota immediately and is reversible — the file is retained so you can unarchive it. You never have to choose between staying under quota and keeping something.
Review it periodically
Run the compliance report to see what is expiring.
Check Upcoming for the consolidated forward view.
Use asset intelligence to find assets with no documents at all — a gap the compliance report cannot show you, because there is nothing to report on.
That last one catches the real risk: not the certificate that is about to expire, but the one that was never uploaded.
Common mistakes
Uploading without expiry dates. Nothing will ever warn you.
Filing everything against whichever asset seems closest. Site-wide documents belong as document assets.
Uploading full-resolution photographs. Storage disappears fast.
Treating upload as the end of the job. The value is in the monitoring, which needs the date.
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