Setting up the right record keeping system for your business will help you work efficiently, meet legal requirements and strengthen customer and staff relationships. Good record keeping can help you protect your business, measure your performance and maximize profits.
There are certain record keeping requirements for businesses across all states of Australia, and depending on your industry, there may be specific laws and requirements related to your sector.
Here we look at the three different types of ways businesses hold and store documents.
The Hoarder
At work, hoarders tend to hold on to printouts, receipts, files, newspapers and magazines. In their anxiety about not losing something, they are so overwhelmed with paper and information they can’t find anything and they never seem to find the time to get organized.
Unlike the scenes that play out on sensationalist current affair shows where the council is called in on the hoarder next door, “hoarders are not always old cat ladies”, according to Matt Paxton, whose company Clutter Cleaner is featured on US reality show Hoarders. Paxton hastens to add, saying that most hoarders “are brilliant.”
“Often they’re very well-educated people” such as professors, teachers, nurses, executives and entrepreneurs, he said. “It’s that really high-end hoarder in the office I worry about, such as the CEO, because you have lots of lost productivity.”
The Shredder
In the opening scene of the movie Argo, embassy workers frantically shred all sensitive documents as militia break into the embassy in what was the beginning of the Tehran hostage crisis where 52 Americans hostage in the embassy for the next 444 days. The movie is the story of six diplomats who escaped the embassy and were hidden in the home of the Canadian ambassador. In the movie, Iranian carpet weavers reassemble the shredded documents to discover the identity of one of the missing diplomats, just as they were about to board the plane to freedom.
While this may be a movie, according to experts this really happened, where shredded documents are painstakingly put back together.
Currently, there are around 80 Acts at both the State and Federal level which regulate document retention and destruction. Legislation is becoming stricter, and safe record storage and destruction requirements are becoming increasingly stringent, with the onus on Australian businesses to ensure compliance.
The proper destruction of business information and documentation is an important part of maintaining customer confidentiality, as well as privacy for important business documents. Compu-Stor can offer secure on-site solutions to take away your documents to our state of the art document destruction facilities or can offer bulk collections of documents for destruction.
The Sensible
The efficient and comprehensive keeping of your business information is paramount to a business fulfilling its obligations to all levels of compliance. Sensible and stable records management needs to include four key elements:
- Document imaging
One of the most important steps in any information management system is document imaging. By outsourcing such a central component, your business will be able to meet compliance obligations without the risk of unsecured or inconsistent procedures. - Data backup and recovery
Securing your information for long-term retrieval is not only beneficial, but mandatory in most enterprises, as losing data can be catastrophic to any business. CompuStor’s data backup and retrieval services ensures that your information will always be accessible if the worst was to happen. - Document storage
We understand that storing information can be a monumental task. Compu-Stor have safe, secure and comprehensive storage capabilities for every type of document storage, including environmentally and security controlled areas. We also offer our customers an online management system known as CIMS, which allows authorised users to securely access their documents and information remotely over the internet. - Document destruction
As much as the keeping of business information in line with obligations is important, destroying it also requires the same commitment to compliance adherence. Compu-Stor provide efficient and secure document destruction services that satisfy every compliance need to ensure sensitivity and integrity of information privacy.
