Provenance is the record of where information came from and what happened to it. It lets you follow a reported figure, an edited paragraph or an AI answer back to its supporting material.
Useful provenance includes the source file or system, the date of extraction, the relevant page or record and any transformations applied. Keep original material where practical. A tidy output without a traceable source is difficult to challenge, correct or reproduce.
A small-business example
A manager receives a spreadsheet showing overdue customer balances. During preparation, someone excluded disputed invoices and grouped trading names under parent companies. The total may be useful, but those choices change its meaning.
A short preparation note identifies the accounting export, the cutoff date, the excluded invoice numbers and the customer grouping table. A colleague can now check both the arithmetic and the judgement behind the result without reconstructing the work from memory.
Try this
Take one claim from a report you use. Follow it back to the original record. Write down every step where the trail breaks or a transformation is unexplained. Add the smallest practical record that would let another person repeat the journey. Preserve the source reference beside the claim.
Set the boundary records selection choices. Version history preserves changes over time, and Retrieval uses source references to make returned material inspectable.