The Customer’s Question
A customer recently came to us with a problem we hear more often than you might think:
“We have an entire storage room filled with old customer files, employee paperwork, invoices, and boxes nobody has opened in years. We know some of it needs to go, but we’re afraid of throwing away something we’re supposed to keep. Where do we even start?”
That is a much better question than simply asking how quickly everything can be shredded.
What Was Going On
The company had been saving records for years without a consistent destruction schedule. Every time someone cleaned an office or emptied a filing cabinet, the documents were boxed up and moved into storage.
Eventually, nobody really knew what was in the boxes.
Some contained customer information. Others contained accounting records, employee paperwork, copies of identification, contracts, and everyday office documents. The business knew keeping everything forever was not a good system, but they also did not want to destroy records they might still be required to retain.
Our Conversation With the Customer
Our first recommendation was not to start shredding everything immediately.
The company needed to identify which records had reached the end of its established retention period. Record retention requirements can vary depending on the type of document, the business, and applicable regulations.
Once the company separated records that still needed to be retained from records approved for destruction, the physical cleanup became much easier.
The customer also asked whether employees should sort through every sheet of paper looking for sensitive information.
In this situation, we explained that trying to decide whether every individual page contains confidential information can create unnecessary work. Once records have been approved for destruction, using a secure destruction process for the entire batch can help reduce the chance that sensitive paperwork accidentally ends up in the regular trash.
What We Recommended
Because the company had accumulated a large volume of records, a one-time purge shredding service made more sense than asking employees to feed documents through office shredders for several days.
Secure containers could be used to collect the approved records. The material could then be professionally destroyed while maintaining a clear chain of custody.
We also recommended that the company create a regular records review process going forward. Destroying records on a schedule helps prevent another storage room from slowly filling up.
What Other Businesses Can Take From This
If your business has boxes of old records sitting in a storage room, warehouse, or unused office, you do not have to solve the entire problem at once.
Start by determining what your company is required to keep and what has been approved for destruction.
Once that decision has been made, RW Lone Star Security can help you securely handle the destruction process so old records do not become an ongoing privacy and security concern.