Quick tips – Archiving documents with FileHold
Deal with the documents you need to keep but don’t need to see every day.
Clutter is the bane of every office. Projects create paperwork or some other physical collateral that invades empty spaces and takes over desks. Discipline can help: strict filing practices can minimize the mess, but the piles still grow and grow and new tasks and initiatives are added on. The move to a digital repository like FileHold can help remove the paper and store it in an organized repository to replace physical filing cabinets and in-trays – but what about yesterday’s documents?
When a document is no longer needed day-to-day, it becomes clutter if you have to see it. Whether you find these documents residing in a Folder you are browsing, or if they keep popping up as part of your search results, they can contribute to the visual noise onscreen that feels chaotic – even when they are organized!
In no way is this an argument for just deleting older documents - there are some very good reasons to store old projects and records:
- Regulatory compliance or best working practices may require organizations to store documents for a defined period after completion, or in some cases in perpetuity.
- Institutional memory is enhanced with good record-keeping; being able to find what was done five years ago can assist decisions today.
- Long-term trends and patterns can be found through a review of previous eras records, otherwise invisible in a fiscal-to-fiscal worldview.
Without knowing your organization’s history, it will be more challenging to chart the future.
FileHold offers a total solution: Archive. This standard feature is a secondary section of your FileHold Library – titled “Library Archive” – where you can send documents that you need or should keep, but remove them from your day-to-day Library. The file structure in the Archive is an exact copy of the Library location, so the permissions to access these documents still apply – the user must be able to see the Schema, Folder, and Cabinet of the document in Archive just like the Library. These are also excluded from Simple Search results, so old documents with the same metadata don’t clog your findings – but they can be included with a quick click in the Advanced Search. You can even right-click on a location in the Archive to do a targeted search. Once added to the Archive, documents cannot be modified or deleted. If necessary, they can be moved back to the Library to be made “current” and editable once more.
FileHold recommends implementing a document retention policy as part of Lifecycle Management. Using the event manager, FileHold can automatically purge documents as per your organization’s policy. For example, if you need to retain invoices for 7 years, FileHold can automatically delete them at that time after they were added to the system, or since they were last edited. This will ensure that you are not retaining documents without value to the organization. This feature is entirely customizable – if you’re required to keep those documents for 7 years but you decide to retain for 10, then purge? FileHold can be configured to do that. If you are required to hold some documents in perpetuity, then they can be stored in the Archive without a disposition policy: your repository, your rules.
To learn some more about how FileHold can be your total document solution for keeping a paperless office and less cluttered repository, contact us at [email protected] for more information.
Chris Oliver brings his twenty years of experience in management in the entertainment industry to FileHold Systems as the Client Training and Retention Advocate. To learn more about how FileHold DMS can work for you, contact him at [email protected].