Digital asset register

One page, and most companies do not have it. Domains and where they are registered; DNS; hosting; mail; the code repositories; the ad accounts and who is billed; the payment gateway; the analytics property; every social profile and the personal account behind it; every SaaS subscription and the card paying for it.

The column that matters most is the one nobody fills in: whose name is it in. A domain registered to a former contractor's personal email is not the company's domain in any sense that survives a disagreement, and the discovery is always made at the worst possible time — during a migration, a dispute, or a renewal that silently failed.

The register is also the fastest due-diligence artefact in existence. A buyer, an investor or an incoming vendor asks for exactly this list, and its absence is itself a finding.

Assuming the company owns what it paid for

Paying an invoice does not create ownership of a domain, an ad account or an app-store listing. Ownership follows the registrant, the account holder and the developer entity on record. Check each one by name against the company, not against the person who bought it, and correct the ones that are wrong while everybody is still on good terms.

A definition sits still. This does not.

The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.

From a brief to work somebody has accepted

A piece of paid work, travelling from the sentence that started it to the moment the buyer agrees it is finished and can carry it without the supplier. 6 steps, acceptance by demonstration is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.

Somebody will quote this number at you.

Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.

Testing a claim that you are covered

“We have backups. Everything is backed up nightly.” · 40 minutes, 6 questions.

Somebody is accountable for this number.

A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.

M&A audit and deal review

Price the system you are buying, not the one in the data room.

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Platform and transactional architecture

The domain model is the product. Everything above it is an interface to it.

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Anti-crisis engineering and recovery

Stabilise before you improve. A system under stress cannot absorb a redesign.

Offboarding

The sequence that removes a departing person's access to everything, in an order that does not lock the company out of its own systems on the way.

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Key-person risk

The number of people whose sudden absence would stop something important — and in most small companies the answer for the digital estate is one.

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Handover

The point at which a vendor's work becomes the company's property — defined by what is transferred, not by the project being finished.

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Named accounts and shared credentials

Access issued to a person rather than to a login everyone uses — the difference between being able to revoke one person and having to change everything.

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Consent record

The evidence that a specific person agreed to a specific thing at a specific time — which is what an authority asks for, rather than the tick box that produced it.

All ninety-six termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.