Your Guide To Document Shredding
If you run a company or organization, keeping on top of your papers and records is critical. In addition to benefitting from the information contained on documents, you need to be keenly aware of the issues surrounding their security. Hard copies of documents contain information that can be sensitive to you or to your clients. That’s why you need to shred sensitive documents when they’re no longer useful to you. Shredding can be important for business and personal use. Storage Quarters offers several document shredding services and we want you to know why these services are so important.
Why Document Shredding is Important
We’ve already touched on some of the basics of why document shredding can be critical for an organization. The financial planning company Signal Financial lays out more reasons on their website, including:
• Legal reasons: Certain laws are designed to prevent data breaches of personal information, such as medical information or financial transactions.
• Business protection: If you run a business, you want to guard trade secrets and prevent secrets about your organization.
• Employee protection: There are several types of documents that can lower employee morale if they’re held for an unreasonable amount of time. Details about wage reviews, salaries, and disciplinary procedures can cause problems if they are seen by co-workers.
• Customer protection: You also want to make certain customers and clients are happy by keeping their data safe. Not only should you shred documents related to customers when they’re no longer needed, you should also let them know you’ve done it.
• Keeping things green: Shredding documents makes it easier to recycle. The shredded documents can be bagged and collected and taken to a recycling company.
What to Shred and What to Keep
If you’re considering shredding personal documents, a big question is deciding what to shred and what to keep. The website Lifehacker lists documents that should not be shredded. Among them are:
• Passports and the ID cards,
• Birth and death certificates
• Marriage licenses
• Business licenses
• Insurance documents (which are useful to keep even if you have a digital copy)
• Social Security cards
• Wills and related documents like living wills or powers of attorney
• Vehicle titles
• Deeds to your property
• Car loans
• Mortgage documents
There are also certain documents that you should hang onto for a period of time and then consider destroying. They include tax records you should keep for seven years; Home purchase, sale and home improvement documents which should be kept for at least six years; Pay stubs and bank statements, which should be kept for a year as should medical records and bills.
You should keep the most recent version of your social security statements, your annual insurance policy statements and retirement plan documents such as 401(k), 529 or Individual Retirement Account Statements.
Storage Quarters Will Provide Secure Shredding Services
If you have documents that need to be shredded, Storage Quarters can offer a secure way to do it. You can bring your documents to our site which contains a state-of-the-art shredding system. We can also come to you by bringing our mobile shred truck to where you need it. We’ll give you a certificate of destruction when we’re done. Contact us today.