How To Professionally Archive Business Material. Archiving doesn’t tend to be the most exciting task in the business world, but it is one of the most important.
That’s because everything you’ve worked on, written down, recorded, and put together forms the history and operational bedrock of your company, to put it mildly.
We can forget about that when most documents auto-save and when we may have cloud storage options set up with our managed IT host, but generally, archiving does require effort too.
That’s especially true if you work for a large organisation.
Such efforts may include everything from invoices and signed contracts to internal strategy documents, product development plans, and HR records.
Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly what to keep and what to get rid of, but in most cases, you’ll thank yourself for having more on hand than less, provided it’s appropriately secured.
Thankfully, many of us are past the days of indexed filing systems in cabinets, so be grateful for that.
However, if you’ve ever gone searching through old servers, paper files, or folders for that one project detail you thought you’d saved but can’t find, you know how important this effort is.
That’s why in this post, we’ll consider how to archive business material with professionalism and care:
Digitise What You Can, But Keep It Organised
It’s important to remember that if you’re going to go through the effort of storing documents, recordings, meeting notes or anything else, it’s a good idea to make sure they’re actually searchable and accessible to the right people.
This is where transcription services can really help.
In this example, you may be saving a library of old meetings, client calls or training sessions.
If they’re just audio files, it’ll take forever to go back through and find a specific quote or timestamp.
But if they’re transcribed and labelled correctly, you’ve got a useful resource you can tap into quickly even by the time in the file.
It just makes life easier for everyone if they need to refer back to something.
Know When To Let Go, But Have Clear Policies About It
It’s good to get clear on what should be protected, and what’s just clutter and you don’t need to index.
So for instance, financial records, signed contracts, employee files obviously need to be locked down securely, sometimes even in line with regulations like GDPR or industry-specific rules.
But of course, there’s no need to keep a draft version of the same presentation ten times over, especially when the final one was sent out a year ago.
The secret to this is learning when something has real reference value, and when it’s just noise, of which businesses often create.
It’s often better to store one good version and stick with that, even if you have multiple copies.
Though remember that throwing out everything immediately but not be a good idea either.
Deciding how long to keep things can depend on your field.
Some businesses hang onto project files for a decade, others cycle things every three years.
Either way, setting a review date every now and then is absolutely worthwhile.
Make Archiving Part Of The Routine, Not An Afterthought
If archiving is only done once in a blue moon, it easily turns into a frustration, the same as if you let your dirty dishes just stand on your kitchen side.
You might do this by assigning the responsibility clearly within a team, or by having a simple checklist to follow after a project is completed and you’re in clean up mode.
That way, the material is saved properly while it’s still fresh and everyone remembers what it was for.
With this advice, we hope you can more easily and professionally archive business material for the better.
Hope you’ve found our article, How To Professionally Archive Business Material useful.
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