With earnings season upon us again, it's a logical time to look at the issue of version control.  This phrase, which will make sense to anybody who's worked through draft after draft of press releases, scripts, op-eds and the like, simply refers to the mundane task of keeping track of edits.

Mundane, but terrifyingly important.   You only need to send out the wrong version of a press release once to understand the danger of poor version control.

What is good version control?  Ideally, it's a foolproof system to make sure you don't miss, skip over or otherwise misplace a set of edits as you draft and redraft critical documents.  This can be very hard to do when you've got edits coming in from 4, 5, 6 or more individuals.  I've had clients where the number rose to the dozens!

So, how is it done?  Let's first look at inadequate methods of version control: