Good practices to your company’s document management

Companies should be aware to the deadlines established by law. An efficient document management protects the business from data loss and ensures agility in attending a possible inspection.

An assertive management goes through a range of good administrative practice, which adds up to the business success. In this sense, the organization of company’s documents plays an important role, although it is still a process to which it is often not given an appropriate attention.

Documents and records storage, maintaining physical or digital files, and managing information are issues that must be planned. There comes in the documents management, a necessary solution for companies of any size and activity.

It is essential that the entrepreneur is always prepared to, when required, present information to the authorities. This initiative brings only positive effects, ensuring agility to the localization of records.

Combining its expertise in tax, labor, and social security legislation to the experience in client’s document management with large amount of information, Domingues e Pinho Contadores prepared a list of good practice to keep the documentary organization. See below:

1. Establish routines and procedures for the task

Invest in creating routines and procedures to file the contents on physical and digital media, establishing when they should be saved and scanned.

It is important to establish a responsible team, a clear filing criteria, classifying the documents per type, date, client, or supplier, when applicable. When establishing the criteria, it is necessary to consider the volume of information to be kept and which practice adapts to the consultation needs.

Also, establish document-handling standards determining which everyone may access and which should be treated as confidential, as well as controls to track the records location.

2. Take the temporality of documents into account

 

Companies must keep some documents respecting deadlines established by law. Thus, it is always necessary to observe the standards to do not run the risk of not finding a record requested by any inspection authority years after occurring the fact.

The periodic disposal of documents that have already fulfilled their functionality is a necessary process both to optimize the space and to allow an easier access to the archive.

It is fundamental to be dedicated to a document management project that promotes a temporality diagnosis, in order to meet the legal and fiscal validity of each type of registration.

Work contracts must be permanently stored; invoices for property, plant, and equipment must be kept during the stay of the asset at the company; bank statements, for 5 years; DARF (PIS/Cofins), for 10 years and DARF of other taxes, for 5 years, just to quote some examples among a huge list of species.

3. Use technology as a document management ally

Technological innovations affected the routine of companies in an intense way in all aspects, and, with the management of documents, it was not different. Today it is possible to coordinate electronic document management and rely on software that helps in this organization and control process.

The practice has not completely replaced physical spaces for record keeping, but has already minimized the use of papers and made easier the access to the data.

Scanned materials must be periodically backed up to avoid losses. There is also the possibility to store digital documents in the "cloud", ensuring greater data security.

4. Raise responsible team awareness

 

Every operative document management demands a team involved with the task. No matter how technology has advanced, people are still responsible for evaluating documents, organizing them by categories, and performing the scanning. Thus, it is necessary to raise awareness on the importance of this process and as the document management contributes to productivity at work.

When outsourcing document management is a good solution

Many companies face problems with lack of physical space to store documents, absence of specialized professionals to provide a diagnosis and difficulty in deploying a document management policy.

However, we must pay attention to this task, as a good storage policy protects the business from data loss and, consequently, penalties for not presenting documents that may be required by inspection authorities.

In this sense, the service outsourcing emerges as a viable alternative and able to contribute to:

• optimize the space from an analysis of what is really required to be maintained, according to the timetable;

• optimize time, once the organization makes possible finding documents in a more agile way;

• the information safety, as an evaluation should specify which data should be kept as confidential;

• costs reduction with specialized personnel, physical structure for storage and recovery of lost documents.

Domingues e Pinho Contadores stands out for the experience with the documents management, working in the organization and archival methodology, respecting the records temporality.

Considering the core activity of each company, DPC prepares a timetable for each client, always obeying the minimum term established by the law.

A DPC’s specialized team provides a diagnosis in order to carry out a file project. Each item is analyzed and classified, evaluating the need to keep them physically and storage period. Scanning what is required to keep is also a facility that may be proposed.

From this moment, the team elaborates a documentary arrangement plan and documents indexation, which will be organized by keywords or descriptors to facilitate its location.

In order to grant quality, nowadays, duly graduated professionals of the area execute this management.

Another option offered to the client is the management of the archive in outsourced physical storage spaces. Thus, after the diagnosis steps, arrangement, and indexation, it is possible to count on DPC's support for continuity of the archive management project. This assures to client a practicality in requesting an specific document when it is necessary to meet an internal audit or an inspection agent demand.

The service may be tailored according to the client company’s needs, with a possibility to contract only modules that meet their objectives: analysis, tracking, identification, cataloging, evaluation of legal deadline for storage, scanning, physical, and electronic organization, indexing/charting, disposal and archive management.