One owner per data item, and rules the system enforces itself

The revenue on the management dashboard differs from the revenue the accountant reports. Both are correct, because they count different things: one includes returns and the other does not. Nobody ever wrote that down. So the management team argues about figures instead of decisions, and a former employee still has access to the client list months after leaving. Data governance is simply this: agree who manages each data item, what it means exactly, and who may see it. Then record those agreements so they hold even when nobody is thinking about them.

Who owns this figure?

In most companies, every data item has a silent owner. Client details belong to the sales desk, article prices to purchasing, and hours to the project leads. But it is written down nowhere, so the sales team keeps its own copy of the client list, with a different phone number in it. We walk through the data that really matters with you. Usually that is no more than twenty items: client, article, order, employee, project, and a handful of key figures. For each one, we record who is responsible, which system holds the source, and what the word means. Revenue, for example, is the invoiced amount excluding VAT and after credit notes. That sounds obvious, but this one sentence prevents the argument in the management meeting.

Agreements that fit a company your size

Data governance comes from the world of banks and insurers, and most handbooks on it are written for them. A steering committee, a data officer, three layers of policy. For a wholesaler with forty people, that makes no sense. We build the small version: a register of a few pages, one owner per data item, and half an hour of review each quarter. That is enough to know whom to call when a figure is wrong, and who must say yes before a new field is added to the CRM. If the company grows, or an audit for ISO 27001 & NEN 7510 is coming, we build on that register instead of starting over.

Access, retention, and what may be deleted

The second half of governance is about who may see data and how long you keep it. This has often grown by accident: everyone was made an administrator at some point because it was easy, and the export folder is full of client files from 2017. We map what each role needs for its work and set the permissions to match. A planner sees the schedule, not salaries. We also agree a retention period for each data item, so old job applications and closed files are deleted on time instead of lingering for years. We handle the legal side of that together with GDPR compliance: which period the law requires and what belongs in your record of processing. We make sure that what is agreed there really happens in your systems.

Governance built into the system, not a binder

A policy document that nobody reads changes nothing. That is why we build the agreements in. Required fields and checks at entry, so a client without a Chamber of Commerce (KvK) number cannot even be saved. An alert when someone changes a price outside the agreed margin. A cleanup script that runs every month and reports what it removed. An overview in your Data and reporting setup that shows which source was used and when the data was last updated. If your existing data is already messy, we combine this with Master data management: clean first, then agree the rules that keep it clean.

The register and the scripts are yours, in plain language and plain code, and your team maintains them itself. Everything stays in the EU and in your own systems. It starts with a free intake, where we look together at the three data items that cause you the most trouble.