10 Filing System Tips for Your Sarasota Office

Proper document management is a concern for all businesses. You see, documents have a natural lifespan. As a result, you must keep specific documents for a certain number of years. Here are ten filing system tips that will simplify your company’s document management.

1. Ongoing Vs. Finished Work

File your in-process and finished documents separately. Document storage and accessibility needs are generally different for finished versus unfinished work. Make certain that in-process documents are easily accessible by those working on them. Finished documents should be organized and accessible for reference and archived if appropriate.

2. Expiration Dates

Outdated documents are useless at best. Keeping old records or paperwork past their expiration date can cause confusion and even legal issues, so develop a document management strategy. Be sure it includes the retirement of outdated documents.

3. Keep Everything Organized

Documents are not helpful if you cannot locate them when needed. Filing systems should be intuitive and straightforward. Steer clear of complex filing strategies unless they’re necessary.

4. Establish Importance

Some documents are more important than others. Pay particular attention to the organization of important documents and keep them secure.

5. Document Security

You must keep documents that contain sensitive, confidential, or critical information secure. Good document security and backup strategy can increase your company’s overall security and the safety of important documents.

6. Digitize

Even documents your company utilizes in paper format and on a regular basis should be digitized. Digitization simplifies the organization, reproduction, and distribution of documents. It also provides an added layer of security.

7. Establish Document Audiences

Understanding appropriate access to specific documents will help establish an effective filing strategy. Documents that have a more restricted audience should be stored more securely.

8. Safe Storage

Even the best office filing system will fail if the storage area is not safe and secure. Use fireproof cabinets when appropriate. If you’d rather use off-site storage, that’s also an excellent way to keep files safe and secure.

9. Build a Document Destruction Policy

You should not file documents past their expiration date. Your company should come up with a secure shredding solution and destroy them properly. In Sarasota, QuickShred can come on-site to bulk shred outdated documents.

10. Securely Collect Everyday Document Waste

Your filing system should only contain important documents, not everyday paperwork. Provide a convenient, secure way to discard less important documents. For example, you can use a secure document collection box for everyday paperwork. Once it’s full, a company like ShredQuick can then routinely collect and shred the contents of these containers.

Call ShredQuick 

Building an organized office filing system will increase the efficiency of your business and the productivity of your employees. Besides, it will keep information relevant, safe, and secure. 

Call ShredQuick, and let us help make your filing system a success.