Enhance Your Company Functions By Formal Record Retention Guidelines

When you have completed the inventory of existing files, it is required that for better management, you as the enterprise manager should establish a user friendly record retention guideline. Often, offices are gutted with huge piles of paper and computer files and people using them are not given guidelines on what to keep and what to discard. Ironically, some organizations have such a guideline, but it is not communicated to the people who need them, or are not provided in a user friendly form. Retention guidelines are also useful in keeping track of information segregated by department, as it proves to be helpful in knowing what other departments keep. In many organizations, usually, we find various departments keeping information about office records. This is unnecessary duplication and takes up lot of space.

When entrusted with the task of formulating such a policy, try talking to the staff members, as the people who use the office files regularly are the finest source of information while developing retention guidelines. You can also use the record inventory form discussed earlier as a starting point for discussion, and try to find out how long people actually use the information that is kept retained. Timely interaction for modification in policy should also be considered for continual improvement of records retention guidelines.

Otherwise talk to your advisor to develop your retention guidelines. You can gain all the information you need from your general counsel and accountant about what information is legally important in your company. In few cases, your organization may perhaps belong to an industry – related association, which in some condition provides additional guidelines. Whatever the case may be, gathering document usage information of your organization is an important step towards developing this policy.

It is a universally accepted fact that retaining data is important, but duplicity is not. In order to avoid this you have to be sure that everyone in your office understands and implements, whenever it is applicable, the originator’s rule: whosoever originates the information is responsible for its retention!

If you want better results from this policy implementation activity, document your record-keeping plan every time. As soon as you’ve collected all the information about records retention in any organization from internal and external sources, it's time to keep the information in some kind of user-friendly form for each department by putting information to your File Index. If your company gets involved in an audit or litigation, you'll be in a better position to protect yourself if you are able to give evidence of your records-retention program.

Having a formal records retention program creates uniformity and consistency and shows an honest attempt to retain information. For example, if some time you are audited and you have only a few records to show, you look sloppy at best. At worst, it will show that you're trying to hide something. It's a good idea to maintain and set up a computer database of the company's records, including the location of all records and how long they have to be kept. This will give you the flexibility to sort the information into different types of lists as needed.

For more information on records retention schedule, visit http://irch.com/.

About The Author

Sarah Jones is an expert on business data management and records maintenance who also likes to write many interesting articles and blogs, helping enterprises in coming up with the best business record retention schedule and document preservation guidelines. She recommends IRCH.com as the best source of information on the subject.

IRCH provides market-leading products and services enabling customers to reduce costs and risks through implementing legally-defensible records retention and destruction practices.