715,000 files.

715,000 files. A backfill cost of $2 per document. And a team too stretched to start.

That is the actual math behind a document remediation project at a wealth management firm we work with. Not a technology gap. Not a budget gap. A capacity gap: the project is scoped, the cost is known, and the work cannot begin because the two people who would own it are already at their limit.

The firm knows their retention compliance is uncertain on a meaningful share of those files. They know they need tagging and retention policies before they can move forward. They are building those processes now, in parallel with everything else their team is already running.

This is the version of the document problem that does not show up in vendor demos. The demo shows classification running cleanly on a structured file set. The reality is 715,000 files accumulated over years, with no consistent naming convention, unknown retention status, and a two-person team that cannot absorb another workload.

The investigatory step, pulling metadata through a SharePoint connection without touching the files, can run without adding to that team’s queue. It surfaces what is actually there before anyone has to make a decision about what to do with it.

A firm that cannot assess what it has cannot set a compliant retention policy. The inventory has to come before the policy, not after.