Document Storage Management
Documents Need to be Retained to Comply With Law and for Other Purposes
Sorting and storing a large volume of documents cost space, time and money. Why should you retain all those papers? The answer is that several purposes are served by retaining business documents safely. Major ones include:
- To Protect Your Interests: If you have to go to a court of law to recover your dues, you would need to produce original documents supporting your claims. You might also need documents to support your case before the tax inspector.
- To Comply With the Law: Tax, Health & Safety, Employment and other Laws regulate that you have to maintain certain kinds of records. Additionally, the regulations often specify that the records must be kept safe for certain periods.
- To Facilitate Business Operations: Design Drawings, Product Specifications, Bills of Materials, Process Flow Charts and similar documents constitute your technical know-how. Even if copies of these are maintained in computers, you wouldn't want to discard these valuable paper documents. Computers can crash.
- To Reconstruct Your Data: Computers can crash and backups can prove unreliable. In such a situation, your only option might be to go back to the original records to reconstruct the computer records.
In such a situation, managing document storage at economic costs becomes an important DMS task.
Document Storage
A typical storage system would be as follows. Paper documents are filed in folders; the folders are arranged in filing cabinet drawers; filing cabinets are accommodated in areas protected from fire, flood and humidity. With the advent of computers, the earlier requirement of accommodating the filing cabinets at the office itself, for easy retrieval, has become less important.
You might need special storage facilities to store large drawings, easily-damaged photographs, important documents like contracts and technology-related documents. Confidential and sensitive documents might have to be stored in extra-strong repositories or strong rooms.
Access to documents must be carefully regulated to prevent unauthorized access.
Document Retention Policies
How long should documents be retained? This question needs to be deliberated and decisions taken, if you want to avoid the huge costs of retaining all documents for eternity.
The decisions would depend on legal and business requirements as they apply to each type of document. For example, contract documents need to be retained as long as there is a possibility that claims might be made either by or against the business under the contract. In other cases, government regulations might stipulate that certain records must be retained for a certain number of years.
You would thus have to consider the requirements document type by document type, and formulate appropriate policies. Systems must also be put in place to implement the policies. If there are no such policies, or if the policies are not properly implemented, you run the risk of paying huge amounts to store old (and probably damaged) documents for unnecessarily long periods.
Conclusion
Requirements like complying with laws, protecting your claims, carrying on the operations and reconstructing lost computer data make it obligatory to retain business documents for considerable periods. Document retention policies must be carefully developed and implemented to minimize associated costs.
In a separate page, Computers and Document Storage, we would look at the impact of computers on document storage.