April 7, 2017 6 view(s)
How’s your records management expertise? If you’re like most people, it’s not great. Of course, that makes you a prime candidate to be picked to set-up or takeover the records management for your company.
Now what?
The first thing you should know about records management for any company is that it’s incredibly important for a variety of reasons.
- Privacy Protection – Keeping your corporate records organized, tracked and secure protects the privacy of a number of your key stakeholders, including your customers, employees and suppliers – not to mention your business.
- Legal Compliance – From accounting to shipping and receiving documentation, you may be required by law to keep certain documents for a certain amount of time.
- Productivity – One of the greatest wastes of time in any business is spent looking for documents and returning them to their proper place. A good records management system will have any document at hand is the least time.
- Saving Space – While searching for documents is a huge waste of time, storing documents unnecessarily can waste a lot of costly floor space in your workplace.
1. Document Classification
The first step in any records management plan is to classify documents according to how long you are required or expected to keep them in storage. That will help you know what you need to keep and for how long. Here’s a quick list of some document retention guidelines to classify documents for storage. It’s not complete and not definitive, but presented here just to give you an idea of the differing lengths of time that you must keep different records.- No Storage needed – Photocopies - as long as your original is secure, there’s no need to keep photocopies. Doing so increases your risk of exposing any sensitive information they contain.
- 3 Years – You should keep any and every corporate document for at least three years. If you’re unsure about a document, plan to keep it for at least 3 years and find out how long it should be kept later. 3-year documents include job application forms from applicants not offered a job and sales invoices.
- 4 Years – Should be the minimum for financial statements and shipping and receiving documents.
- 6 Years – Most corporate correspondence, including general, production and purchase correspondence, and many insurance and personnel files.
- 7 Years – Many tax documents, employee records and financial documents.
- 8 and Up – From statements of claim, to your general ledger, many documents should be kept for at least 8 years and some you should keep forever.