Policies

Which Version Is Actually in Force

An employee asks HR which travel policy applies to their region. Legal needs to know whether the code of conduct in force last year is the one that governed a since-closed investigation. An auditor wants proof that every subsidiary formally adopted the anti-corruption policy, not just the parent company.

Most organizations answer these questions by searching a shared drive for the newest-looking file. That works until two people find different “newest” versions, or until a policy was quietly restated and nobody updated the copy in the employee handbook. Lextree gives internal policies the same treatment as any other compliance record: one register, one current version, a documented history of every amendment, and a record of exactly who adopted it.

The Policy Register

Each policy lives as one record — code of conduct, a compliance policy, an HR policy, an IT security policy — tracked by its title rather than by whichever file name happened to stick. The record carries a category, an effective date, a next-review date, and a retired date once the policy is superseded. Notes capture the reasoning behind changes so a reviewer two years later understands why a clause was added or dropped, not just that it was.

Acknowledgment tracking works the same way: the policy records whether acknowledgment is required and where the evidence lives — an LMS or an HR system — as a pointer rather than a duplicate copy. Lextree keeps the policy record; your existing acknowledgment system stays the system of record for who actually signed.

Still tracking policy versions in a shared drive? Grab our free company policy register template and bring it into Lextree when you’re ready to stop guessing which file is the current one.

Every Version, on the Record

Policies change. A restatement rewrites the whole document; an amendment adjusts a section; a translation makes the same policy usable in another office. Each of these is a document under the policy, recorded by document type and effective date, with the original policy itself always the first row in that register. Annexes and correspondence attach as files to the specific document they support, so a five-year-old amendment doesn’t get buried inside the current restatement.

Because every version is a dated record rather than an overwritten file, answering “what did this policy say on March 3, 2024” is a lookup, not an investigation.

Who Has Adopted It

A policy written by the parent company doesn’t automatically apply everywhere the same way. Some policies are genuinely group-wide; others need explicit adoption by specific subsidiaries, or apply with local variations. Lextree records adoption as its own register — one row per organization that has adopted the policy, with the date it did. An empty register reads as group-wide by default; specific rows show exactly where scope narrows or an approval was required locally. The board or committee minutes approving that adoption stay where they belong, in that entity’s minute book — the policy record keeps the pointer to when adoption happened, not a duplicate of the approval paperwork.

Reviews That Happen on Schedule

Every policy carries a next-review date, and Lextree fires a reminder ahead of it — not because the platform knows your review cadence, but because you set it once and it holds. That review date is a governance choice, not a computed deadline: an annual code-of-conduct review looks different from a quarterly review of a fast-changing IT security policy, and the platform accommodates both. When a review results in changes, the restatement becomes the next document in the register and the effective date moves forward, leaving the prior version intact for anyone who needs to see what changed.

Policies in Context

A policy doesn’t exist in isolation. Governance covers the board and committee action that approved a policy in the first place; the policy module tracks what was approved and who adopted it afterward. Employment holds the individual acknowledgments and role-specific requirements a policy might trigger — the policy record itself stays about the document, not the roster who signed it. Entity-specific adoption ties back to Legal Entities, and a policy referenced as a defined term inside a vendor or partner agreement connects to Contracts.

When someone asks which version of a policy governed a decision, or whether a subsidiary was actually covered, the answer is a record — not a guess based on file modification dates.