Dealing with disciplinary records
The retail industry is all about offering high quality, quick service, and building loyalty by providing the best possible customer experience. Simultaneously, businesses also need to keep prices competitive by reducing costs.
In that competitive environment, every hour your office employees spend rummaging through old documents in the file cabinet is money lost. The good news is that there is a better solution for sorting and arranging your company’s commercial documentation, so your employees can spend more time doing what they do best.
This blog will detail the problems with existing retail document management, how long your business needs to retain records, and the best way to do it.
Enhancing employee productivity
Retail employees, particularly those who work in a more administrative role, regularly need to check data about products, brands, and shipments, among other things. Retail records are also crucial to decision making on everything from purchase quantities to creating a better shopping atmosphere.
However, data stored the old-fashioned way, in filing cabinets, makes it slow to access and limits data to a single location. The alternative, corporate databases, are often cryptic and hard to use, and usually not accessible for average retail employees.
In either case, employees need to sacrifice productivity and spend time finding relevant information or offer a less-than-satisfactory service to the customer. This can cost you sales, lower staff efficiency and resultant in increased operating costs, among other issues.
A better option is to reach out to a professional record management company, which can help with scanning and long-term storage of your documents.
Cutting paper usage
The thought of going paperless is often one of the foremost reasons that businesses consider when adopting document management software. Companies don’t want to deal with filing cabinets in this century, and many are pursuing initiatives to become greener and more sustainable.
Paper usage is also a needlessly large expense. From supplier invoices, shipping forms, employee files, receipts, inventory forms, and other files, the average retailer is drowning in papers.
Consider Access Record Management for a better alternative to relegating your data to boxes and boxes of A4 paper.
What types of records should you be keeping and for how long?
According to Documentstorage.co.uk, some documents need storage until a particular task is complete. Successful quotations, for example, should be retained until the invoice is paid. Unsuccessful quotations should be retained for six months.
Most documents are independent of tasks, however, and should be stored for reference for a set number of years. Budgets and financial reports, for instance, should be stored for two years. Income tax returns and purchase orders should be retained for three.
Many documents require storage for six years. These include invoices, purchase copy order books, cheques, customs & excise returns, goods in advice notes, and VAT records. Income and expenditure records should be kept for an additional year, at seven years.
The longest-term storage is necessary for only certain essential documents. Keep taxation returns and records for ten years, and statutory accounts for twelve years.
Managing your retail documents
Although it can seem daunting at first, it’s crucial to get into the habit of proper document management. Begin by creating a schedule for retention and eventual destruction of your documents. It pays to take some time at the beginning of each month for sorting and filing new records and deciding which are permanent and which are temporary. Next, consider whether they can be sent for indefinite storage or if they’ll need to be retrieved more regularly.
For records which are going to spend a long time in storage, it’s worth investing in purpose-built archive boxes. If you’re working with electronic documents, you also need to take precautions such as creating multiple backups. As tempting as it is to go entirely paperless, you should still keep physical copies of original documents when possible.
If you want more information on managing your retail records, contact our team to find out more about our competitively priced records management and secure shredding of physical files.
Related Posts
