Document retention is just one of the many long-term benefits that is provided by switching over to a secure, efficient, paperless document management system to handle your records. Following is an overview of what document retention can do and how document retention can benefit a business of any size, regardless of industry type and/or geographical location and its employees.
What Is Document Retention?
Document retention is a system that allows you and your employees to automatically create policies and determine what should be done with particular documents or records at a certain point of time. Some of the many options that this retention module affords you include:
- Automatically delete certain files on a particular day (or at a particular time).
- Have files automatically moved to a new folder, system, directory, or site.
- Copy and/or send files to someone on a certain day or at a certain time.
It is important to note that there are different retention setting options that allow for both automatic document management and destruction or for pop-up confirmation windows. If you are pretty sure (but not 100% certain) that you would like a certain action to be taken at a certain time, then the latter setting will allow you to have more control over your files. On the other hand, those who would rather not hassle with confirming pre-determined actions can ensure that these actions are taken, even if they are not at a computer.
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Why Use Document Retention?
Document retention and destruction is fully compliant with security protocols, ensuring that moved, copied, and deleted files do not fall into the wrong hands. Following are some more benefits to using this aspect of online document management:
- Document retention policies makes it easy to keep your paperless office organized in the long-run.
- Getting rid of confidential files on a regular basis helps to ensure that they do not fall into the hands of a would-be hacker or belligerent employees.
- Putting files into archive storage when they are no longer being used on a regular basis makes it easy to find current files.
- Archiving or deleting old, out-of-date information ensures that your business is operating using new, current information. This helps employees avoid serious mistakes such as shipping orders to the wrong address and/or sending emails to the wrong person.
Getting Started With Document Retention
The first step is to set down company guidelines and policies regarding how certain files are handled and for how long. Make sure that all employees who are using the online document management system are aware of your company’s retention protocol.
You may want to archive most or all of your old files instead of deleting them. A file that does not seem important today may be vital tomorrow. While it is sometimes possible to retrieve deleted documents, it is time-consuming and a big hassle. It’s just best to keep them in storage elsewhere.
Those who are not using document retention as part of an online document management plan are missing out on a helpful, time-saving feature that can help a business stay organized, effective, and productive. Document retention saves you and your employees the hassle of going over old documents and deciding what to do with each one. You simply have to set the retention module to perform a certain action at a certain time and let the system take care of keeping files purged, organized, and updated.
If you’re ready to implement automated document retention into your workflow, discover Revver.
