Top 5 Tips for Business Document Archiving and Storage

With all of the moving pieces involved in running a business on a day to day basis, document archival and storage can fall by the wayside. Although the initial time and cost investment may seem prohibitive, establishing routine practices for proper handling of your business documents pays dividends in the long run. Below we’ve outlined five key tips to consider when outlining your strategy that will benefit your internal and client-facing operations immediately and for years to come.

1. Audit Your Documents

The first step in archiving and storing your business’s documents is understanding exactly what you’re archiving and what kind of access will be required to ensure your business continues to run smoothly during the archival process.

Would customers be more apt to give you repeat business if they had more direct access to digital receipts of their past orders, perhaps to reorder supplies by clicking a button? Would managers benefit from being able to access sales numbers from other departments? Should some documents remain on-site for security concerns? Answering these sorts of questions should dictate how and what you choose to store.

2. Establish a Document Management Policy

If a single link in a chain breaks, the entire chain is broken; in a business, the flow of data is only maintained so long as every employee knows his or her role or “link” in that flow. Delineating a clear and effective document management policy takes time to implement, but doing so ensures your business runs as efficiently as possible while staying abreast of the latest legal requirements.

Documents that are redundant or have passed their retention period should be securely destroyed to protect your employees and customers from identity theft and the inadvertent dissemination of trade secrets. Data crucial for day to day operation should be secured and accessible in a manner befitting that need.

3. Digitize Critical

An important document that can’t be located or accessed by all employees who require it might as well not exist. Solving this problem of access by paper alone (i.e. distributing copies) is not only wasteful but also increases the chances your company’s most valuable information falls into the wrong hands - internally or externally. You can’t password protect a physical printed page. You can’t monitor who’s reading it.

With proper access controls, digitized versions of your mission critical documentation eliminate the pitfalls associated with paper in a collaborative environment. Everyone with appropriate access stays “on the same page”, with one canonical version shared with no room for misunderstanding. Team members can be notified of substantive changes as they occur, and access can be granted and revoked with the click of a mouse.

4. Secure Historical Data

Knowing the dangers associated with identity theft, you wouldn’t leave your National ID or Iqama lying around in the open. And if you’re even more conscientious, an old bill with personally identifying information would likely go through a shredder before disposal at home.

The benefits of securing the historical data of your business are no less compelling. Such data may not be integral to the current day to day operation of your business, let alone accessed on a regular basis, but it does constitute a substantial liability should it fall into the wrong hands. Enterprising thieves and competitors in your business’s verticals can survey past internal workings of your business to predict your next moves based on how you’ve allocated resources and past directives, allowing them to undermine your efforts before you’ve seen fit to make them public.

Whether your business concerns allow storing historical documents off-site in a protected facility or require them kept on-site, ideally with a trusted Physical archiving service provider, offloading the responsibility allows your business to focus on doing what it does best rather than getting bogged down in boxes and bureaucracy.

5. Prioritize the Schedule for Archiving

This last tip may seem like a no-brainer, but without proper prioritization, the rollout of a comprehensive document archival and storage strategy will likely add to your organization’s internal friction, increasing frustration among employees. The implementation of any new element to your business processes will invariably require adjustment, but a well-considered .

Deliberately and clearly prioritize the order in which your company’s records should be archived. Would one particular department especially benefit from the immediate digitization of records as discussed in the third tip? Similarly, could some documents wait to be digitized based on infrequent access for the foreseeable future?

Following these five tips, your business can confidently do what it does best without devoting additional overhead to potentially frustrating trivialities on a day to day basis.