When someone asks for a tool you have never heard of
The request will arrive, it will be enthusiastic, and the temptation is to say no. Four questions produce a better answer in ten minutes.
A colleague comes to you having found something that would genuinely help with their work. You have never heard of the company, the website is three months old, and they want to start on Monday.
Saying no is the safe answer and the wrong one, because it teaches people not to ask. Saying yes without looking is how the accounts from the 19 September inventory appeared in the first place. Four questions sit between the two.
One: what goes into it?
The only question that really matters. If the answer is « nothing that is not already public » — a tool for editing images, for formatting text, for generating a diagram — then most of the rest is unimportant and you can be quick.
If the answer involves customer data, personnel data or anything under a confidentiality obligation, slow down and go through the rest properly.
Two: who is behind it?
Not a reputation check. A five-minute look for two specific things: where the company is based, and whether they publish anything about how they handle data. The 4 July post on reading a trust page covers what to look for.
Absence is informative. A company that says nothing about data handling has usually not thought about it.
Three: what happens when it goes away?
Small tools disappear, get acquired, or change their pricing by a factor of five. Ask what your colleague would lose if it vanished in six months. Usually the answer is « nothing much » and that settles it in favour of trying.
Four: is it paid?
Free tools are not free. Where there is no price, the business model is elsewhere, and for anything touching company data that is a reason to prefer a paid tier even at a small cost.
The answer you want to give
« Yes, for anything that is not customer data, and let us look again in three months. »
That keeps the enthusiasm, bounds the risk, and gives you a date. It is also a decision the person named on 8 September should be able to make alone, which is the point of naming them.