How to inventory your company's data in an afternoon

Most owners and operators underestimate how much data their company has, mostly because it's spread across a dozen tools nobody has looked at all together. The good news: a useful inventory doesn't require a consultant or a data team. If you have admin access (or someone who does), you can build one in an afternoon.

This guide gives you a step-by-step checklist, a simple template, and the shortcuts that save time. You don't need to export anything. You're just counting.

What you're trying to answer

For each system, you want five things:

1. What it is (tool name and what it's used for)
2. Roughly how much is in it (messages, files, records, gigabytes)
3. How far back it goes (oldest meaningful data)
4. Who owns it (which admin can access it)
5. Anything sensitive (HR, legal, customer data, regulated information)

Rough orders of magnitude are fine. "About 2 million Slack messages since 2018" is a perfectly good answer.

Before you start: list every tool

Spend 20 minutes making a list. Good sources:

• Your company card and AP records, filtered for software subscriptions
• Your single sign-on dashboard (Google, Microsoft, Okta or similar), which shows connected apps
• A quick message to team leads: "What tools does your team use every day?"

Don't forget legacy systems you've stopped paying for but never deleted, old shared drives, and on-premises servers. Older history can matter.

The system-by-system checklist

Email (30 minutes)

• Platform: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or something else
• Number of mailboxes, including shared mailboxes
• Total mail storage (admin consoles typically show storage per user and in total)
• Oldest mail retained, and whether retention policies delete older messages
• Active legal holds (note them; they matter later)

Chat (20 minutes)

• Platform: Slack, Teams, Google Chat
• Number of channels and active users
• Total messages or activity level (Slack and Teams admin analytics typically show activity metrics)
• Workspace start date
• Your plan, which affects export options

Documents and files (30 minutes)

• Google Drive, OneDrive/SharePoint, Dropbox, Box, network drives
• Total storage used and approximate file counts
• How far back files go
• Main file types (documents, spreadsheets, PDFs, drawings, images)

Wikis and SOPs (15 minutes)

• Notion, Confluence, Guru, SharePoint pages, Google Docs folders, binders on a shelf
• Approximate page count
• Whether procedures are current, and whether old versions are kept

CRM and sales (20 minutes)

• Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, an industry-specific system
• Record counts: accounts, contacts, deals, activities
• Years of history
• Whether notes and emails are logged in the CRM

ERP, accounting and operations (20 minutes)

• QuickBooks, NetSuite, Sage, Acumatica, Dynamics, an industry ERP
• Years of transaction history
• Which modules you use (orders, purchasing, inventory, projects, production)

Industry systems (20 minutes)

This is often where the most distinctive data lives: project management, field service, TMS, practice management, agency management, ATS, property management or an EHR. Note what each holds and how far back it goes.

Support and ticketing (15 minutes)

• Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Jira Service Management, a shared inbox
• Ticket counts and years of history

A simple inventory template

Copy this into a spreadsheet:

The numbers above are placeholders to show the format, not benchmarks.

Leave the "Include?" column as "Review" for now. Deciding scope comes later, once you know what's there.

Flag sensitive areas as you go

You're not making decisions yet, just noting where care is needed:

• HR, payroll and benefits
• Legal matters and communications with counsel
• Board, investor and M&A material
• Customer data covered by contracts or privacy commitments
• Regulated data: health information, payment cards, Social Security numbers, financial account data, background checks
• Anything under a legal hold

These usually become exclusions or special-handling categories. See is it legal to sell company data?

Shortcuts that save time

• Ask whoever manages IT (internal or outsourced) to pull storage and user reports from admin consoles. Many can do it in minutes.
• Use billing pages: many SaaS tools show usage and storage on the billing or plan page.
• Don't chase precision. Within a factor of two is plenty for an initial offer.
• Note history gaps. "We switched CRMs in 2021 and didn't migrate notes" is useful to know.

What to do with the inventory

A finished inventory tells you three things: which systems are substantive enough to matter, where the sensitive areas are, and how much history you have. It's also exactly what a broker needs to get you an offer. See what AI labs look for in enterprise data for how buyers read it.

It's useful beyond any data deal, too. Many companies discover forgotten subscriptions, unclear admin ownership or retention gaps while doing this exercise.

Getting started

Once you have rough numbers, you have everything needed for an offer: which systems you use, about how much is in each, years of history, headcount and years in business. You can even skip the spreadsheet and enter estimates directly in our form.

DataOffer turns those estimates into a packaged profile, takes it to multiple labs and brings you the best offer. There's no upfront cost, and nothing is shared until you approve the buyer, price and terms.

This guide is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Figures and ranges are illustrative; talk to qualified advisors about your situation.