Dealing with disciplinary records
Small business success depends on a number of crucial factors: strong leadership, good cashflow management, loyal customers, and more.
Whatever factors apply to your business, they’re all underpinned by smooth operational processes. Poor records management can have a significant impact on smaller companies, especially in instances where key client or financial documents are compromised, misplaced or not easily accessible.
Regardless of your business’ actual size, it will have to manage its fair share of agreements, invoices and various other types of documents. These digital and paper records have to be stored somewhere secure, yet accessible.
This can be a problem because it’s unlikely that you’ll have lots of available office space in which to store boxes of paperwork. If your records are mostly digital, you still need to ensure that they are kept safe. To make record keeping for small businessesas easy as possible, we’ve outlined five best practices to follow.
Know which records to retain and for how long
Good record keeping doesn’t mean hanging onto every single document forever. Different records are subject to different retention periods. It’s important to comply with legislation and build a retention and disposal schedule that includes each type of record generated by your business – and outlines the relevant processes.
Simplicity and clarity are key. Your records retention schedule needs to cover the type of records subject to retention periods, the minimum period of retention as per the law, how these records should be retained, reviewed and destroyed, as well as who is responsible for which records.
Make sure records are easy to retrieve
Records don’t always sit still in storage. They often move around between colleagues and departments at organisations such as law firms and healthcare providers at various times, for various reasons. Not being able to retrieve these key documents efficiently can be incredibly frustrating when you need a specific file urgently and you can’t find it. What’s more, if you can’t track and trace their locations, it’s easy for files to simply disappear into the ether.
To avoid losing or misplacing records, develop a simple yet consistent catalogue system that categorises and tracks records. Records management software is one solution that makes it easier to retrieve important documents as and when you need them. Whenever a record is retrieved, its barcode is scanned. This way you’ll know when a record is in or out of storage, when it was retrieved, and where it was taken.
And, if you’ve outsourced your records management needs, make sure your provider can retrieve and return documents to you within a short window of time.
Reduce administration and costs
Unfortunately, secure, accessible and legally compliant records management is not a one-off endeavour. It needs to be an ongoing operational priority – which can put pressure on a small company’s limited resources. While some companies manage their record keeping in-house, it is far less hassle and cost to outsource your document storage.
With the right provider onside, you will save valuable time and money. Rather than getting your small business bogged down in unnecessary administration, let experts who are in the business of records management attend to your needs – so that you can get on with running your company.
Control access
Security is a key element of records management. Documents that deal with sensitive information, such as HR and financial records, need to remain confidential. How and where you store your documents is critical – but so is who has access to them. To manage your records according to best practices, you need to control who can retrieve them and for what purpose.
Once you’ve designed your records management system, establish authorised users. Authorised users are ultimately responsible for specific files and need to keep a close eye on both paper and digital files – both of which are easily lost or compromised.
Ensure complete accuracy of records
It maybe goes without saying that badly-written or messy documents are not particularly good records of information. Records need to be accurate and stylistically concise, otherwise they don’t provide much value down the line.
Over the years, employees will come and go, and new staff will lack the background context of team members who have moved on. It’s very important that every document explains itself clearly with no room for ambiguity. Accuracy is key to ensure relevance should a file need to be referenced in the future.
At Access Records Management, we know how to help companies manage their files efficiently and securely. To find out more about how we help with record keeping for small businesses, speak to one of our experts today.
Related Posts
