Toss, Scan or Store?
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October 27, 2022
Toss, Scan or Store?
Doers it feel like your office is getting smaller? Is finding documents a hassle? Finally, the moment has come to deal with the elephant in the room—your growing paper document collection. The challenge is determining where to start and what to do next. Here are some suggestions for choosing what to throw away, scan, or store.
Clear the information backlog
In order to comply with laws and industry regulations, you are required to destroy any records that have outlived their retention periods. As a result, clearing out the backlog of paperwork taking up space in your office should be your top priority. One-time shredding services provide a quick, affordable, secure, and sustainable solution to get rid of outdated or duplicate papers.
If you hire a professional shredding service like Infoshred, a uniformed, background-checked shredding professional will visit your company, collect your documents, and either destroy them on-site while you watch or drive them to a shredding facility for destruction.
- We can pick up Boxes of paperwork or prior to your purge project, collection containers can be dropped out at your company.
- You get a Certificate of Destruction for your documents with any option.
Reduce crowdedness
Records that are no longer needed for legal or business purposes should be systematically disposed of every day to keep your workplace space organized. You can utilize Infoshred’s scheduled shredding service for effective and secure document disposal – choose 4, 8 or 12 week pick up frequency.
- Files may be swiftly inserted into a locked shredding console rather than having to remove staples and paperclips and manually feed documents into a paper shredder.
- Then, on a regular basis, (4, 8 or 12 weeks) each console’s contents are emptied, and everything is carefully shred.
Archive correctly
After you shred the documents you don’t need, you have to organizing the records you must keep—you also need to identify how long to keep them and which may need to be retained indefinitely. The safest or most practical place to store these records isn’t in your office. To make sure that your archival records inventory is correctly managed and preserved, use an off-site records storage service complete with a commercial records center.
Commercial records centers are climate-controlled buildings with particular security measures in place to protect your company’s records from natural disasters and unwanted access. These specially designed facilities provide:
- Fire suppression equipment
- Digital monitoring
- Access restriction and observation
- An inventory management system tracks all data and barcodes them, making it possible to discover, retrieve, and send products at any time.
Scanning
Your vital, active business files are all that are left after you trash the expired documents and archive the remainder of your retention inventory elsewhere. For increased efficiency, convert these to digital photos to free up even more office space and expedite your file distribution and retrieval procedures. Using a set procedure, a document scanning service provides a rapid and practical way to go paperless:
- Your files are expertly arranged.
- Remove all binders, folders, paper clips, staples, and sticky notes.
- Your hard copies are converted to digital files using fast scanners.
- In order to make your documents searchable, indexing software is used.
- Your digital files are moved to the physical media type or document management database of your choice.
A good records management program continuously evaluates which documents should be kept and how best to access them. Include the “throw, scan, or store” method in your records management plan right away!
Request an estimate on our website or by calling 860-627-5800 to learn more. Our experts will ask you a few questions to better understand your requirements, after which they will tell you exactly what to expect from start to finish, including the cost.