Not so long ago, there was a time when a company going through an audit process had to provide quite a few stacks of paperwork to back up their operations, very much in the same way as most people had to keep paper records of their expenses to handle their taxes. These days, this doesn’t happen so often since technological developments allow both companies and individuals to keep organized records using hard drives, software and cloud space.
While it’s true that the digital world is overtaking physical records with each passing day, almost every financial advisor will tell you that going fully digital is a very bad idea. It’s a fact that digital records make everything easier, especially if you are using custom-made software to handle the information contained on them. But the undeniable fact is that the digital world is still prone to confidentiality and security issues.
Each format has their advantages and disadvantages and since our business is to deal with space or rather with the lack of it, we will share with you some of the facts about why both digital and physical document storage have their place in businesses and homes across the country. Let’s read on:
Assessing what you need
For any private person or business operation, the ideal setting would be to keep updated digital records on par with physical ones. The physical document should be the official copy – the one that should be preserved and maintained – and the digital one should be used as a reference copy.
The cold, hard reality of maintaining both types of records with up to date information is that the process itself is very time-consuming and you’ll need to consider a few things to handle them in a way that goes accordingly to the type of business you are running.
Keeping your documents at hand
If you need constant access to your digital records, having access to the cloud depends very much on your internet connection so it would be wise to have a good service provider and your servers should offer remote access to whoever needs the information stored on them.
When we talk about assessing your needs, this is especially aimed at physical records since they can be very hard to locate if kept spread all over the office in an unorganized way.
While almost every document can be easily located on your digital records, this might not be the case with its physical copies. And as it usually happens, these are the ones that are requested for legal purposes but keeping all this amount of paper records on the premises is usually a bad idea in terms of space organisation. These files can occupy a lot of office space that could be utilised in a much better way. Therefore, you should only keep the most important physical documents (the ones that are closely tied with legal processes related to your business or your personal finances) at hand and store the rest off-site in a secure nearby location so that they can be quickly retrieved if needed.
This is why that many companies and even private citizens are already taking advantage of everything that self-storage has to offer. If you need to keep safe records of contracts or legal and financial documents, then renting a self-storage unit is the perfect option to properly store them in a clean, safe and secure environment.
Closing thoughts
The truth is that the longer you operate and generate revenue, the more documents you will need to stack so, to properly safeguard them you will need to combine the tools provided by both worlds.
On the digital end, you need to do your homework about the best provider out there when it comes to cloud services or specialized networks handling digital records.
To physically store your documents, feel free to contact the U Store It storage facility nearest to your premises and one of our qualified and friendly staff will gladly help you make the right decision for your business.
All of our top of the line facilities offer storage units in many different sizes, that are easy to access, secure and even temperature-controlled if needed.
With U Store It, your records will be safely stored on a location that is convenient for you and your business, this way keeping your valuable office space and home clear of paperwork.
