Overview
Every business keeps paper it cannot throw away. Signed employment contracts, commercial registrations, title deeds, customer agreements, copies of national IDs — originals whose value is that they are originals. Somebody has to know which cabinet each one is in, who borrowed it last March, and whether it came back.
Nama’s Document Management System is the register for exactly that. The useful way to think about it is a catalogue of physical paperwork that happens to carry scans, rather than a place to store files.
That distinction matters more than it sounds, so it is worth being blunt about it: attaching a file to an invoice or a customer record is not this. Nama already lets you attach a file to any record it holds, and that is a different mechanism with different settings. DMS is for the documents that also have a shelf, a custodian and a borrowing history.
The filing structure you build once
Three master files describe where paperwork lives, and they are set up at implementation time and rarely touched again.
An archive is a physical place — a room, a strong room, a bank of cabinets — and it carries a catalogue of the slots inside it, down to the shelf and the drawer. A folder tree is the logical filing: Company Documents → Employee Files → Employment Contracts, nested as deeply as the filing plan needs. A topic is the subject classification a document is filed under — “Employment Contract”, “Licence”, “Identity Document” — tied to the folder and the archive it belongs with.
Get those three agreed with the people who actually handle the paper, in that order, before a single document is registered. Everything downstream points at them.
The document, and who has it
An archived document is one piece of paper on the register: what it is, which folder and topic it is filed under, which archive and which shelf it physically occupies, who it belongs to, and the scans attached to it. Copies are tracked separately from the original, which is the distinction that matters when somebody asks for “the contract” and means the signed one.
Movement is a voucher, not a status change somebody types. Checking a document out, bringing it back, transferring it or disposing of it are all recorded as document movements, and a folder movement does the same thing to a whole folder at once. Committing a movement is what drives the document’s state, and the history is the audit trail: this document left the archive on the 14th, with this person, and returned on the 21st.
For an archive that already exists as scans, a bulk loader turns one ZIP file into hundreds of registered documents rather than asking a clerk to key them in.
Two things to design around
Both of these are documented, both are real, and a process built without knowing them will quietly go wrong.
The state is a label, not a lock. A document’s state reports what the last committed movement said. It does not restrain anything — a document marked disposed can still be edited or moved again. Treat it as a report, and put the control somewhere that actually controls: an approval cycle on the movement voucher, or a permission rule on who may commit one.
A transfer records an intention, not a result. Moving documents to another shelf writes the destination onto the voucher and into the history, but does not rewrite the document’s own location fields. Move a contract from shelf A-01 to B-01 and the document still reads A-01 until somebody edits it. Until that changes, the register stays truthful only if the location is updated by hand as part of the routine.
What it is not
There are no expiry reminders. A document carries a renewal date and an expiration date, and nothing in the sub-module reads them — if you need warning that a licence lapses next month, that is a scheduled task over a filtered list, which is a few minutes of setup rather than a feature you switch on. There is no full-text search inside the attached scans: documents are found by folder, topic, owner, archive or code. There are no per-folder permissions, so access is the ordinary security profile with a row filter rather than a padlock on a folder. And nothing ships as a printed report — the list views and their exports are the reporting.
None of that stops it being the right tool for the job it does have, which is knowing where the original is. It is worth setting up with those limits in mind rather than discovering them in month three.
The seven screens, the filing structure, the movement voucher and the ZIP loader are documented in the Document Management guide.
