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At Perfect Retention, we’ve been working in document storage (New York) for the last 70 years. With our experience, we’ve seen quite a few mistakes from companies and other entities looking to offload their documents. Here are few tips that we have to streamline your document storage in New York. Make sure to reach out to Perfect Retention to learn more.

Understand New York State Guidelines on Document Storage

One of the biggest issues that we see is companies going about document review without any knowledge of New York’s document storage guidelines. For example, New York state law requires businesses to keep their payroll records for at least 6 years following their creation. Furthermore, tax documents are also required to be kept for at least 7 years.

At Perfect Retention, we commonly see companies disposing of documents which they legally need to keep. Make sure you keep track of all of your materials so you do not run afoul of the state’s requirements.

Assess Your Business’s Document Storage Needs

Another big issue from companies is that they often have not done a proper assessment of what documents they need storage for. Many companies often have not assessed what documents they need to storage based on a criteria. Rather, we often see piles of documents, which have no correlation to each other, all categorized together. This makes it much harder to properly organize.

In order to effectively storage your documents, make sure that you assess what they’re pertaining to and make sure you keep track of the list.

Create a Filling System

Once you’ve assessed your business’s documents, you should create a filing system in which your categorized items should be organized under. Typically, we advise that this be done by department. However, depending on the size of your company, this might not be a worthwhile endeavor. For smaller companies, we have also found that sorting documents based on tasks like, billing, human resources, and other internal operations are also a good option.

Furthermore, color coding should be used to designate the document’s importance. Labeling can also be used to name specific documents and separate them from the rest of the pile.

In order to properly track your document, create a system to properly file them.

Establish a Document Retention & Destruction Policy

Many businesses keep documents that they do not need to. In order to remedy this, create a scheduled review for documents. Form a list of items of items that need to be shredded and items that you would like to keep. This will help you purge documents that you no longer need to have and free your storage for more important items.

These are only a few tips for document storage. As you’re looking in potential ways to offload your document storage, make sure to reach out to Perfect Retention.