How an engagement is set up

The scope note is written after one conversation and sent to you to correct. It is the only document that decides what the work is.

• The routines in the work, listed by name as you call them.
• The rooms and the days each routine will be watched on.
• The documents to be read, and who will put them in a folder.
• What comes out: a sheet per routine, a holder list, a note of gaps.
• What is not in the work, listed as plainly as what is.

Anything not on that page is not in the work. Adding a routine later means a line added to the note, initialled, and a day added to the diary.

Less than most owners expect. A morning in the room where the routine happens. The contracts in a folder, paper or scans. Twenty minutes with whoever runs each routine.

No logins are asked for. Nothing is connected to your till, your accounts package or your email, because a written procedure can be produced without any of them.

Where a step happens inside a system, the holder is asked to show it on their own screen while it is described. The description goes on the sheet; the screen is not copied.

What is seen during the work stays between this office and you. Nothing about your business is used as an example anywhere, including on this site, which is why every sheet quoted here is invented for the purpose.

Your staff are told the same thing before the first question. What they say goes on the sheet, where they can read it, or it goes nowhere at all.

Drafts are held as files on one machine with one backup, both in this office. They are returned to you and deleted here when you say the work is finished.

If you want a signed confidentiality agreement of your own wording instead of these paragraphs, send it with the scope note and it is signed as sent.

Four things are out unless the scope note puts them in, and each is out for a reason rather than for form.

• Anything about a named individual's performance. Sheets describe routines, not people.
• Advice on money: tax, accounts, funding, pricing. That is somebody else's registered trade, not this one.
• Legal opinion on a contract clause. Terms are copied and compared; what a clause means in law is for a solicitor.
• Hiring, dismissal and any disciplinary process.

Where a conversation runs into one of those, it is said at the time and written in the gap note. Silence followed by an opinion is how an engagement grows a shape nobody agreed to.

It ends on a handover. You get the sheets in two formats, the holder list, and a short note of the routines that were out of scope or had no documents to read.

Then it stops. No review is scheduled, no check-in is pencilled in, nothing renews. The supplier sheet is the only part of the file with dates in it that matter later, and those dates are yours to diary.

If you want the file revisited when staff change, that is a new scope note and a new signature, written when you want it rather than agreed in advance.

You can stop at the end of any day, by saying so. What is written to that point is handed over as it stands, marked DRAFT where it has not been read back.

A half-finished file is still worth having. Two signed sheets on the two routines nobody else can run is a better week's outcome than a full file nobody has read.

To start, write to advisory@revvdconsultancy.site and name one routine and the room it happens in. The reply is a scope note, not a brochure.