Archives, Records and What to Do With Old Files

Archives are the quiet cost in an office move. Boxes of files are among the heaviest things a business owns, they take real space at both ends, and a large proportion of them could have been dealt with years ago.

A move is the natural point to sort it, and doing so before the truck arrives is where the saving is.

Just-In-Time Moving works throughout St. George and Washington County.

Start with retention, not with volume

The temptation is to sort by how full the room is. Sort by obligation instead.

Different categories of record carry different retention requirements: tax and financial, employment, contracts, client or patient records, and anything covered by a professional or regulatory obligation. Those periods vary by industry and by record type, and getting them from your accountant or advisor is a short conversation.

Once you know what must be kept and for how long, everything divides cleanly into keep, dispose and digitise. Without that, nobody feels able to throw anything away and it all moves.

Digitise selectively

Not everything, which is expensive and rarely justified. The material you actually retrieve, and anything you must retain for years but seldom look at.

Confirm that a digital copy satisfies your retention obligation before destroying an original, since for some record types it does not.

Dispose securely

Anything past its retention period and containing confidential information goes to a secure destruction service with a certificate, not into a general waste load.

Bulk secure shredding is inexpensive compared with moving and storing paper you should not still have. This is the step with the clearest payback in the whole exercise.

Packing what remains

Small boxes only. Records boxes exist at a specific size for a reason: a large box of paper cannot be safely lifted.

Number every box and keep a contents list. An unlabelled archive is functionally lost, and rebuilding the index later costs more than labelling it now.

Keep the sequence intact rather than mixing categories, and tell us if the boxes must arrive in order.

Where it goes at the far end

Decide before the move, not after. Archives that arrive without a destination end up stacked in a corner of the new office, which is the most expensive storage you will ever buy.

If you use a storage unit, remember it is uncooled here, and heat and humidity swings are hard on paper over years. Price climate control against the value of the records.

Call (435) 862-3080 or email office@movingjustintime.com.