The retail industry is all about delivering high quality, fast service and customer loyalty by delivering the best possible customer experience. At the same time, companies must keep their prices competitive by reducing their costs.
In this competitive environment, every hour your clerks spend browsing through old documents in the filing cabinet is a loss of money. The good news is that there is a better solution for sorting and organizing your company's business documentation so your staff can spend more time doing what they do best.
This blog describes the issues with existing retail document management. How long your business needs to keep records and how best to do it.
Retail staff, especially those working in a more administrative role, must regularly review, among other things, data about products, brands and shipments. Retail documents are also crucial for making decisions about all purchases, to creating a better shopping experience.
However, data stored in filing cabinets in the old way slows access and restricts data to a single location. The alternative, enterprise databases, is often cryptic and difficult to use, and generally inaccessible to average retailers.
In both cases, employees must sacrifice productivity and spend time finding relevant information or offering less than-satisfactory service to the customer. Among other things, this can cost you sales, lower the efficiency of your staff, and increase your operating costs.
A better option is to contact a professional recording management company that can help with scanning and long-term storage of your documents.
The idea of becoming paperless is often one of the most important reasons that companies consider when introducing document management software. Companies do not want to deal with filing cabinets this century, and many are taking initiatives to make them greener and more sustainable.
Even the paper consumption is an unnecessarily high effort. Supplier invoices, shipping forms, employee files, receipts, inventory forms, and other files cause the average retailer to sink into papers.
Use Access Record Management as a better alternative to move your data into boxes and boxes of A4 paper.
According to Documentstorage.co.uk, some documents must be kept up to a certain task is complete. For example, successful bids should be kept until the bill is paid. Unsuccessful offers should be kept for six months.
However, most documents are independent of tasks and should be kept for reference for a set number of years. For example, budgets and financial reports should be kept for two years. Income tax returns and orders should be kept for three years.
Many documents must be kept for six years. These include invoices, purchase order booklets, checks, customs and excise returns, goods in notes and VAT records. Records of revenue and expenditure should be kept for another year, ie seven years.
Long-term storage is only required for certain essential documents. Retain tax returns and records for ten years and statutory accounts for twelve years.
Although it may seem daunting at first glance, it is crucial to preserve them in the habit of proper document management. First, create a schedule for the retention and eventual destruction of your documents. It pays to take some time at the beginning of each month to sort and file new records and decide which ones are permanent and which are temporary. Next, consider whether they can be sent for unlimited storage or whether they need to be retrieved more frequently.
For records that spend a lot of time in memory, it pays to invest in a specially created archive boxes. If you work with electronic documents, you must also take precautions, eg. For example, creating multiple backups. As tempting as being completely paperless, you should still keep physical copies of the original documents, if possible.
For more information on managing your retail records, contact our team to learn more about our competitive pricing file management and secure destruction of physical files.
