Document shredding is an essential part of any business. The simple truth is there are various documents that need to be kept and these all have confidential information on them. Simply throwing these documents into the bin means other people can access them and potentially steal the information. This would allow them to steal identities and obtain a vast amount of finance in other people’s, and even the business’s, names.
Choosing Your Shredding Option
There are two methods of shredding these annual documents:
1. Using A Professional Service
There are companies that provide shredding services. They simply collect your material that needs to be shredded in bags and then put everything into a commercial shredder. They should be properly licensed and have a good reputation. Make sure this is the case before you use them.
They are generally a good idea if you purge shred.
2. Purchasing Your Own Shredder
The alternative, which is a good option for most businesses, is to invest in your own industrial shredders. It’s important to note that these are specially designed for the application, ensuring the documents are shredded horizontally and vertically as well as shredding them finely enough that they can’t be pieced together.
It’s important to note that as cheap domestic shredders often only shred one way and don’t completely destroy the information.
What Is Purge Shredding?
Purge shredding refers to the idea of shredding a large volume of documents in one go. It allows businesses to save paperwork and then shred it all at specific intervals. This can be annually, or monthly, depending on the amount of paperwork produced.
This is often seen as a good idea if companies produce huge amounts of paperwork or they only need to have shredding undertaken once a year.
Don’t forget, you only need to keep company records for seven years, after that they will need shredding. This can create a large quantity each year at a given time and why, for time management reasons, many businesses like to send their shredding to a specialist.
Regular Shredding
However, if you regularly shred items, such as those generated in the daily sales process, you may prefer to have the industrial shredder on site and simply push the paperwork in as needed.
If you adopt this approach it is usually easy to split your annual shredding into months and eliminate it while doing daily shredding chores.
This approach minimizes the cost of shredding and ensures the company s in complete control.
It is important to note that shredding companies are supposed to shred the data as soon as you pass it to them. However, you have no way of knowing what actually happens to the paperwork, who sees the information, and how long it is before it is actually shredded. All of these factors represent security risks to you, your reputation, and your customers.
That’s why an increasing number of businesses are opting to purchase their own shredders and make sure the information is properly destroyed.
