A record is a structure, not a file format
People hear "digital record" and think of a PDF, a portal or a QR code. Those are outputs. The record is the structure underneath: named things, with relationships between them, that can be queried and versioned.
The test is simple. If someone asks "why can this product claim 30 minutes of integrity, and which components does that cover?", can your system answer without a person reading documents? If the answer lives only in a colleague's head or in the body text of a report, you have documents, not a record.
The four things it has to hold
Identity: what the product is, what it is called, which references identify it, and which version you are talking about. Without a version, nothing else can be pinned down.
Claims: what you say the product does — a characteristic, a value, a classification, and the standard the value is expressed against.
Evidence: the tests, classification and assessment reports, certificates and declarations behind those claims, each with its own reference, issuer, dates and scope.
Scope: the configuration each claim and each piece of evidence applies to. In fire doors this is the whole game, because performance belongs to a tested assembly rather than to a product name.
Versions, publications and the difference between them
A version is an internal revision: a change to the specification, the permitted components or the claims, approved by a named person on a date. A publication is a snapshot of a version that you have chosen to make public.
Keeping them separate is what lets you answer historical questions. A customer who bought in 2024 needs the record as it stood in 2024, not the current one. If publishing overwrote the previous state, that question becomes unanswerable and "we changed the closer in 2025" turns into an argument rather than a fact.
Why a folder of PDFs falls short
A folder holds documents, not relationships. It cannot tell you that classification report CR-002 is the only thing supporting the EI 30 claim on configuration C1, that it expires next March, or that the leaf specification changed after it was issued.
The failure mode is silent. Nothing breaks when a certificate lapses or a component is substituted; the folder looks exactly as it did the day before. The claims quietly stop being supported and nobody finds out until someone asks.
What good looks like
Each claim points at the evidence that supports it and at the configuration it covers. Each piece of evidence carries its own dates and limitations. Changes create a new version rather than editing history. Publication produces an immutable snapshot with a hash. Anything you hand to a third party — a link, a QR code, a JSON export, an evidence pack — is generated from that one structure rather than assembled by hand.