Document storage – What To Do First After You’ve Secured Your Service Provider?

Once you have secured your service provider for your document storage, it is time to sit back and look from an overall perspective on what are the documents that you need to store. This is no different from sorting and setting aside the important ones to keep while throwing away the not-so-important documents. But where do you begin then?

1) Make a list of criteria of how you select the documents to keep. Have some benchmarks.

If you are able to find a pattern in your operations on the lifespan of a document, say 6-10 months, then go thru your pile which ones that you think will not be required once these reach on the 10th month of safekeeping.

Another criteria that you can set is that if the document is no longer valid. If it is not valid anymore, then keep only the cover page where it proves that it is no longer valid and throw the rest of the pages to thrash.

2) Sort thru your pile of paperwork

Once you have decided the basis of keeping important documents, then it’s about time to sort it into two – to keep and not to keep. This is no different from sorting your items at home.

3) Shred documents that you will no longer use but contains very sensitive information

Most of the time these documents contain sensitive information like customer data or financial information. Thus, it is just right to have a shredder on hand and have these torn to several pieces.

4) Make some identifiers or bookmarking to locate your files easily

Organize, organize, organize. It is good to file the items accordingly in order to locate these easily later on when you are going to retrieve these at the end of your contract.

5) Scan important documents that you think have a higher chance to be referenced but do not require the hard copy

If you have documents that you think would be referenced but does not require any hard copy to be pulled out, then it’s easier to have scanned copies handy. Some service providers would provide hard drive or cloud storage for free or a very minimum fee.

These are just a good start to seeing what are the steps of going thru business storage. There are so many other ways to do it but this can help you jump start it.