Every business keeps records of its clients, customers, and patients. For many companies, that means there can be stacks of paper dedicated to just one individual taking up valuable space in the office. Many of these files will accumulate over the years, and not all of them will be active.
If your office has a storage room brimming with inactive files, there are better ways to keep all of this information on-hand without it taking up valuable office space. Check out some tips we at Acro Photo Print Inc. compiled below to help you reconsider how you’re maintaining your inactive files.
1. Reevaluate Your Retention Schedule
Some types of businesses, such as law firms and medical offices, are required to keep their clients’ and patients’ files around for a certain period of time. Other businesses without such requirements may simply find it hard to part with information they might one day need. This means that many files can become inactive with each new year, adding to a burden that could literally be piling up somewhere in your office.
Before you follow any of the other tips below, reevaluate your retention schedule and how you’re keeping your oldest or least-used files separate from those that are active or seem to get revisited on a more frequent basis.
2. Digitize Your Files
If you’re concerned about losing information you might need in the future, digitize your files. It’s a lot easier than you think, and especially when you hire our professionals at Acro Photo Print Inc. to do it for you. By scanning your inactive files and converting them into PDFs, the only storage you’ll need is space on a hard drive or in the cloud!
To preserve the information your inactive files – and even your active files – all you have to do is send them to us and we’ll scan them for you. We have special devices that can provide high-quality scans of high volumes of material, which can ensure that even the bulkiest archive can be digitized in almost no time!
In addition to PDFs, we can convert files to TIFFs, PNGs, JPEGs, or other file formats that are best suited to the type of document and your needs. We also offer Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning services, which make it easier for you to find the information you’re looking for in files once they are scanned.
3. Shred Inactive Files after Digitization
After your inactive files have been digitized and securely stored in a virtual space, there’s no real reason why you have to keep them around anymore. That said, don’t just go hurling them into a dumpster just yet. As you’re probably well aware, there could be a lot of sensitive personal information about your former clients and patients in these records.
It’s not worth it to risk letting information fall into the wrong hands, so securely shredding those old documents is the best way to deal with them. Acro Photo Print Inc. can also handle your shredding needs, ensuring that your inactive files are safely and securely destroyed.
For more information about all of our services, we encourage you to contact us online!