What you have to write down
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Record keeping in skincare is a legal obligation as well as a practice, and the records are what turn an incident into a bounded problem.
Four records that join up
The formula, versioned and dated, with percentages, process, addition sequence and temperatures.
The raw material record: supplier, lot number, certificate of analysis, date received.
The batch log: what was made when, from which lots, at which formula version, with the measured pH and viscosity and the units produced.
The test file: challenge results, stability data and the safety assessment, each tied to the formula version and package they apply to.
Separately they are paper. Joined, they answer the question that eventually arrives.
What MoCRA expects
Record keeping and adverse event reporting. A brand that receives a report of a serious adverse event has obligations, and meeting them requires knowing what was in the product the person used.
Those are the same records a wholesale buyer asks for and the same ones an insurer wants to see, which is why building them is not purely a compliance cost.
Retained samples are evidence
A sealed sample of every batch, stored cool and dark, labeled with the batch code. Paper says what you intended; the retained sample is what you actually made.
It is the only way to settle a drift question by examination rather than argument, and the only way to compare a complaint against the product as it left you rather than as it is now.
How long, and where
At least the product's shelf life plus a margin, and longer for anything with a long declared life. Adverse events can be reported well after purchase.
Keep it somewhere that is not only your laptop and not only your handwriting. A shared document and a physical file covers the failures that actually happen, and write it so that a competent stranger could follow it, because that is the situation it exists for.