Document Retention and Destruction in the New Year

A new year means resolutions for you—and your business. Just as you might be resolving to eat better, exercise more, and save more money, you might be making similar goals for the health of your business too: saving time and money, enhancing your profitability, and improving your compliance.

But where do you start with goals like these? Well, document retention is actually a smart, simple place to begin. Document retention and destruction can improve your company’s efficiency, profitability, and regulatory compliance. Ready to learn how?

What is Document Retention?

Basically, document retention, or a document retention policy, is a standard operating procedure that helps your business process, retrieve, secure, and destroy the documents that help your business run.

A document retention policy can help your business achieve many beneficial goals:

• Regulatory compliance: Depending on your industry, some documents must be retained for specific amounts of time. Destroying or otherwise being unable to locate these documents if necessary could lead to your business facing fines or other issues.
• Increased efficiency: A document retention policy makes it easier for you and your employees to locate documents when necessary. This means less time is wasted sorting, and more time is spent doing the work that drives your business forward.
• Legal safeguards: A well-designed document retention policy can protect your business in case a customer or contractor disputes the services you rendered them, or if they fail to meet their obligations to you.

A document retention policy may seem like it’s too small an action to drive results, but a good one can be like a strong foundation, and can have a profound impact on your business.​

Document destruction is an important part of a document retention policy

An important part of document retention actually has nothing to do with retaining documents at all. Document destruction is crucial to your document retention policies success, and in mitigating the legal risks your business could face.
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So, to begin the year on the right foot, start by purging any documents that no longer serve a purpose and your business is no longer required to keep. As you purge old documents, make sure to pay attention to the following:

• Which documents do you use the most? Consider how you might process, store, and organize these documents or files to maximize efficiency.
• Which documents are you legally required to keep? If you destroy documents that are requested in a legal case, you could be liable for having destroyed them. Pay attention to which documents your business is contractually or legally required to maintain.
• Which documents are liabilities? Similarly, if you’ve held on to documents longer than necessary, you could risk being held liable if they fall into the wrong hands. By promptly destroying documents that are no longer needed, nor serve any purpose, you keep your business safe from unnecessary litigation.

R4 Services Can Help Protect Your Business

Document destruction is an important part of any business’ document retention policy; it protects you from needless litigation, liability, keeps you in compliance with your industry’s regulations, and makes your business more efficient and profitable.

Lost or stolen data costs businesses over $48 billion each year. Don’t contribute to that number. With R4 Services document shredding services, we can help you destroy outdated, sensitive materials, on your site or remotely.
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Don’t wait. Protect your business today. To learn more about how R4 Services can benefit your business, contact us today.

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