4 Common Mistakes Businesses Make With Paper Records

4 Common Mistakes Businesses Make With Paper Records

The transition of paper records into digital transcripts has made day-to-day business easier while forcing you to keep less physical copies of your documents around the office. There’s still some need for paper records, which means that there is still plenty of room for mistakes. Let’s take a look at the four most common mistakes that businesses make when handling their paper records.

1. Transposition Errors

When copying the same number from one document to the next, businesses tend to make transposition mistakes. They’ll reverse the numbers, flip them around and jumble them up in ways that can ultimately work to defeat their purpose. Preventing this can be as simple as double-checking documents that you had to manually label, or teaching the right person to do so.

2. Misalignment of Physical and Digital Copies

Physical documents have the unique advantage of being right the first time. It’s the fact that copies tend to degrade in quality due to misalignment of the pages that can eventually make them tedious and hard to read. When making a copy of a paper document, ensure that you align it properly. You want it to come out as close to the real thing as possible, otherwise you may end up with copies that are more of a headache than they are useful.

4 Common Mistakes Businesses Make With Paper Records

3. Improper Disposal of Documents

Improper disposal of documents is one of the leading ways that identity theft occurs. This results in thousands of consumers, employees and businesses having their crucial information stolen by cunning thieves each year. Keeping this information out of the wrong hands is as simple as destroying your documents by shredding and then recycling them so that they can’t be recovered. You can either create shredding policies yourself or find services like those of Paper Recycling & Shredding Specialists.

4. Unsecured Storage

Next to improper disposal, unsecured storage of paper documents is the next leading cause for information theft. While you should try to trust your employees at every turn, all it takes is one disgruntled staff member working late one night to lift a copy of your most important financial records. This can end up being costly to your business.

The best way to ensure that this doesn’t happen is to lock your documents up. Ensure that only your most trusted employees have access to your most sensitive documents.

Paper Documents Can Be as Safe as Digital Documents

While digital storage of documents is hailed as being both more compact and secure due to the fact that they’re held as digitized data, it’s possible to make your paper documents just as secure and accurate. You just need to dispose of your documents in a safe fashion, keep them secure and ensure that any copies you make are pristine reprints of their originals.