4 Tips for Better Corporate Records Management

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.

But knowing the benefits of records management doesn’t put you any closer to knowing how to put those benefits to work for your company. Below are a few basic guidelines to help you better understand the nuts and bolts of records management and set-up or maintain a management system.

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.

2. Storage Systems and Record Management Boxes

Once you know what you need to keep and for how long, then you need a system for storing them. Records management boxes are a staple of any system. Sturdy, durable and sized to hold letter- and/or legal-sized documents, records boxes are easy to handle and stack. A variety of labelling systems can be used to identify the contents of each box for quick location and retrieval of a specific document. If you have a variety of records in a single box, file pockets and file folders can be used to separate and identify them in the box.

3. Storage Area

You need to store your records in a secure place that can accommodate additional records as needed in the future. Each record management box should be easily accessible. A shelving system that lets you stack two boxes on top of each other on each shelf is ideal. Make sure the box labels are visible. As time goes on, your records storage requirements can start to take up a lot of valuable office space. Off-site document storage is an option for documents that you don’t need to keep at hand or for those that you have scanned and don’t need the originals.

4. Use Shredding Machines for Records Destruction

One way to minimize the space used to keep your records, on-site or off-site, is to have a regular schedule of records destruction. As the time-frame for maintaining your records expires, you can remove them from your storage area and have them securely destroyed and recycled. A shredder is a great way to destroy documents but preserve the material for recycling. Again, these are guidelines that are just meant to give you an idea of what goes into a good records management system. There are a number of reputable records management consultants and companies that can help you make sure your business enjoys all the benefits of efficient records keeping.