For Records Retention, Being a Pack Rat has Advantages

With little effort you can identify more than 50 documents that require some extent of record retention. The length and format of retention varies greatly and can be impacted by tax laws, accounting codes and other factors.

Do you still have that contract or lease from the office equipment you disposed of 7 years ago? What about property appraisals, depreciation schedules and trademark registrations? Those should be easily accessed for as long as you've been in business. But how many businesses can readily find and access these records at a moments notice?

To help understand the importance of records retention, we've compiled a Suggested Records Retention Schedule.

If you're like most businesses, records retention and retrieval seems to be well managed on the surface. But did you know that nearly 33% of employees working hours are spent storing, retrieving and researching documents? And it costs over $150 to locate miss-filed documents. Look around your office and do the math. The cost to business is staggering.

The rush to computer driven business (the past 20 years) initially led us to believe that the workplace would become paper-less rather than paper driven. The reality is that the wealth of information we have at our fingertips is now generating even more paper. When combined with new regulatory and compliance demands of Sarbanes-Oxley and other recent laws, it's easy to see how the demand for accessible documents has grown.

Every piece of paper has a life. The life of that document is determined by the value to the organization in terms of satisfying customers, conducting operations, and creating an accurate records history. The Records Retention Schedule tells you how long to keep a document but it doesn't tell you how. At American Micro Co. our business is simply helping companies improve business resources and customer service through better records management.

We unbox Kansas City business using the latest digital imaging technologies that make your business more paper-efficient and less prone to the risks of lost documents. If you need to improve your records retention and retrieval practices, give us a call and we'll show you how other leading Kansas City companies are using document management systems to get ahead of the competitors or attend one of our free webinars on document management solutions.