When it comes to business information, most records should be safely stored. A variety of different sectors use record storage services like ours, from financial and medical, to legal and media. Whilst these are our most popular sectors, we do encourage all industries, however niche, to consider using this service. Here is a more detailed insight into the types of documents stored by each industry.
Financial Records Retention
It is now more important than ever to ensure your financial documentation is recorded and retained securely and appropriately. Depending on how your business is set-up, you are required to keep certain records by law and others for safeguarding in future. Whilst the minimum retention period to store financial records is 6 years, to protect your organisation from any nasty surprises, you should consider storing your financial documents for an indefinite period of time.
For all employers, by law, you must hold all PAYE records, including:
- Payments made to employers
- Any deductions e.g. Tax, National Insurance, Student Loan Payments
- Details of employee benefits and expenses
For Limited Companies that are VAT registered, by law, you must hold the following:
- VAT account
- VAT sales and purchase invoices
- Delivery notes (Import and Export documentation)
Additionally, it is essential for Limited Companies to store the following documents:
- Accounting Records e.g. assets, liabilities, income and expenditure
- Business Records e.g. bank statements, paying-in slips, accounts books, purchases and sales information
For any business it is essential that you keep your financial records stored; and if you are just starting out, again it’s more important to have a thorough record keeping system in place from the beginning. More information can be found on our Financial Records Storage page.
To learn more about how proper records management has protected the financial sector check out this blog post: The Financial sectors battle with Cyber Crime
Medical Record Storage
More than any other industry, the medical sector is one of the strictest when it comes to storing records. With patient’s confidential data, as well as other sensitive information, there are mandatory retention policies in place that all medical professions must adhere to. For example, all NHS practices in the UK have compulsory storage requirements as set out by the Department of Health. If you run an NHS practice, you must keep the following medical records on file, securely:
- All GP files
- Vaccination records
- All records for patients under 25 years of age
- Mental health reports
- Armed forces personnel
- Criminal records
In addition, the aforementioned records have different mandatory retention periods. For example, all GP files and vaccination records must be stored for a minimum of 10 years. In the case of GP files, this is a minimum of 10 years after the patient’s death.
Mental health records must be kept for a minimum of 20 years and patients under 25 must have their records kept until they reach 25 years of age. Criminal records and records for armed forces personnel must be kept indefinitely. For more information on Medical Record Storage, please visit our Offsite Medical Records Storage page.
Offsite Media Storage
In the ever expanding industry of media, a number of production companies, as well as film and editing professionals, seek out secure ways to store their large array of media. Whilst other sectors are relatively straightforward in terms of the types of documents being stored, for media based companies there’s a whole host of documents that are needed for archiving and storage.
If you think about the types of different media documents, you can appreciate that the data is not always in the standard format. Documents can include:
- Films
- Tapes
- DVDs
- Hard Drives
With some of this data being quite old and rare, it’s also of high value. In some instances the footage could be quite sensitive. As a result it’s imperative to ensure that wherever you store your media, they have the highest specification of security and disaster prevention methods. As such, be sure to check out our Offsite Media Storage page for more information.
Legal Document Management
Finally, and by no means least, legal document storage is one of the most significant industries when it comes to securing important documentation. Law firms, solicitors, as well as internal legal teams of businesses all over the UK, and indeed the world, will look towards storage solution companies to help with the securement of this data.
These records are often of a ‘live’ nature; this is probably more so than any other sector that requires records management services. This means that rather than just archiving their documents for the sake of meeting retention guidelines, legal professionals instead tend to maintain a fully functional archive, but do so from an off-site storage centre. The nature of the legal industry results in this intensive data retention and retrieval requirement.
Examples of ‘live’ legal files, which can and need to be called upon at a moment’s notice, include:
- Wills
- Deeds
- Motions
- Transcripts
- Contracts
More information can be found on our Legal Document Management and Storage page.
So, we hope this has given you a few ideas with the types of documents you can store with a document storage company, such as ourselves. For more information on any of the industry related document storage, please see the specific industry related pages.
