A document I expected is missing from a case

A case has run and something you were confident about is not in the results. Work through it in this order, because the causes get harder to check as you go.

1. Check the scope before anything else

Open the case and read its conditions. Conditions combine, so each one narrows the result further, and the commonest cause is a scope that excludes the document rather than a search that failed to find it.

The usual culprits:

• The date range. The document falls outside it, or the date Govflo indexed differs from the date you are thinking of. An email thread carries the date of each message, not the date the conversation started.
• The custodian. The document lives in someone else's mailbox. A message you remember receiving sits in the sender's account too.
• An exact phrase. The record uses different words. Program names, abbreviations and internal shorthand all defeat a literal match.

Widen one condition at a time and re-run. Removing conditions diagnoses faster than adding them.

2. Check it is in a searched source

Discovery searches the sources you added to the case. A document in a system Govflo is not connected to will never appear, however the search is worded.

Check which sources the case actually searched, not which ones exist.

3. Check the connection was healthy

Go to Settings, then Integrations, and confirm the source was connected when the case ran.

A failed connection is reported there rather than as an empty result, so this is a quick check rather than a likely cause. Do it anyway before concluding a document does not exist.

4. Check whether it was excluded rather than missed

A document your agency has already classified as confidential may be deliberately held out of a working set rather than absent from it.

Where that happens it appears in the case history as excluded, with the reason recorded. That is a different finding from not existing, and it is the finding you want when someone asks about that document later.

5. Then consider that it may not exist

Only after the four checks above. A record you are sure about may have been deleted under a retention schedule, may never have been created, or may exist only on paper.

Record what you did

Whatever the outcome, write an internal note listing what you searched, where, and over what period. If you tell a requester a document does not exist, that note is what supports the statement.

An unrecorded search is not evidence of anything.