When considering storage for your business documents, it’s important to find a storage facility that is safe and secure. Make sure to do your research beforehand so that you can ensure the storage facility you choose fits all your needs. All of your documents, receipts and archives are important, and keeping them well organised is integral in keeping efficiency in the workplace.
Although you may not need those documents in the foreseeable future, it is very important to keep them somewhere that can be easily accessed in case you need to recall a transaction.
If you are a business owner in need of archiving some documents, we’ve put together some useful tips to help you in your archiving journey.
1) Keeping files at home.
- Your home is never the ideal place to store important business documents. While you might think these papers are safe at home, it’s possible that your kids and pets can potentially ruin them. As well, if you’re sharing a house with friends, you don’t want them having access to confidential information.
- Keeping files in the workplace can be just as bad. Ideally the best place to keep your files is where no one else can access them, and where you have room. If your business is scaling quickly, you may need room for documents in the future. You don’t want to be leaving your documents all over the office, this could make things very messy, and affect office productivity.
2) Not ensuring safety measures
- You want to make sure that the storage facility you choose for your archive documents is safe and secure.
- Ideally, the facility you choose will be complete with CCTV, security fencing, coded access and sufficient lighting.
- Make sure to do your research before committing to storage.
3) You don’t use archive boxes
- Not storing your documents properly could be a nightmare for you. Ensure that you use proper sturdy boxes, and make sure you don’t overfill these boxes or leave too much room for your documents to shift around.
4) No organisation
- There needs to be some planning involved when storing your belongings, and this goes for important documents as well. Make sure that you use an organisation method that makes sense to you, and that you can use continuously. You could create a floor plan of where all of your archive boxes are located inside your storage unit, and the contents of each box. This way you know exactly where to go, you won’t have to go though all of your boxes randomly.
5) Not labelling boxes
- Label your boxes so that it’s easier to retrieve what you are looking for. Using something like a sharpie will work, or you could get creative and make some proper labels it you wanted to. Just make sure you know what is in each box.
6) Only keeping physical documents
- You never know what might happen next. Only having physical paper copies of your documents could mean you lose your information forever. Make sure to create digital copies and save them on a separate hard drive. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
7) Improperly disposing of documents
- When it comes to getting rid of your archived documents, make sure they go through the shredder, for security and privacy reasons.
Hopefully these useful tips will help you well on your way to storing all of your archive business documents.
