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.