A Look into UK Record Retention Policies

Every company deals with paperwork one way or another regardless of what products they sell or what services they offer. The difference lies in the amount of paperwork they have to file and store in on-site or off-site storage facilities; a five-year-old health care facility, for example, will naturally have more files to keep than a newly opened pastry shop. Still, every record serves a purpose to an organisation—whether they are employee information records or bookkeeping records.

The real question is whether these records are still relevant or past their prime. Some records are vital during tax auditing or any legal process, thus, they must be kept for as long as they are useful. However, assessing a document's importance can be difficult, which is why policies on record retention were established—to give businesses a clear idea on how long they should keep certain files and when it is the right time to dispose of some.

Personnel administration files, for instance, like copies of employee contracts must be disposed of six years after termination or resignation of an employee. Meanwhile, income tax form P60 (a complete and accurate record of all payments made to an employee) must be kept for six years, while employees must retain their tax records 22 months after the current tax year. Corporate insurance policies must be permanently retained and stored in a secure document storage facility.

The Benefits of a Document Storage Service

There are several advantages to subscribing to a document storage service. The most obvious of these is the freeing up of space in your office or business facility. Whether you're running a large corporation or a small, home-based one, freed space is always welcome. It can be used more productively: to make room for new staff, as an additional conference area, or even just to give employees more elbow room to create a more pleasant working environment.

By entrusting your business documents to a document storage service, you can also save some valuable office time usually spent on filing and organising. Document storage services come with a cataloguing system that allows the service provider to retrieve any document you may need in a timely manner. It also employs a mechanism through which both you and the storage service provider can keep track of any document's whereabouts.

Another benefit of a document storage service is security. Reliable storage services keep their clients' documents in strong, secure boxes, which are housed in facilities with 24/7 protection. Documents that need utmost confidentiality, like medical records, are usually kept in specially-designed boxes with added security features. Likewise, because of the strength of these boxes, you can be assured that your documents will be better protected from disasters and emergencies, such as fires and earthquakes.