6 top tips for archiving your valuable business documents
Archiving is an essential task for businesses large or small. As well as being able to show a clear paper trail, evidence of contracts and agreements made, information for future repetitive activities, data on employees and product specifications, and storage for financial information you are not allowed to dispose of due to governmental legislation, it will not be long before records are beginning to interfere with daily activities on a serious level. Here are some tips to get your archiving in order, make the most of your self-storage and get on with your everyday business:
- Introduce regular auditing
Before you can start boxing everything away that huge mound of paper that is not used on a daily basis, you need to do a full analysis of what needs to be kept and what can be thrown away (always think recycling). You will need to be quite ruthless and this activity necessarily causes quite a great deal of useless procrastination. The easiest way is to consider whether the data will be needed in the future or if it needs to be kept for legal reasons.
- Digitalise data
Some of the documents you need to hold on to do not necessarily need to be held on hard copy, so consider digitalising that data so that it will be useful to reference in the future. This can be a little time consuming as you will need to scan these items and create an ordered place in your computer storage where you can always track back stored information. At the same time, it can reduce cost of storage and also put your mind at rest where you feel unsure about destroying certain documents.
- Durable containers
We often think little about the boxes we are going to place our archive materials in, but make sure the boxes are tough and durable as they may have to store the archived data for a long period of time.
- Self-storage opportunities
Self-storage can be a great way to store business archives at cheap rate. It means, as your business grows and thrives, you can keep relevant data in one place which is ordered and indexed. Of course, location is important and storage facilities need to be as close as possible for easy access. But if you are a business in London consider finding self-storage in Kent to cut overall cost of long term archive storage.
- Clearly label retention dates
There will be some data that only needs to be kept for a set period of time due to government legislation. Make sure these archives are clearly labelled so you can make more room for new data coming in and easily accessible within the self-storage facility.
Looking for storage space in Faversham Canterbury or Herne Bay? To learn more about how Need A Space self-storage can help businesses in Kent and the London area click here