Whether you work from home or save bills, receipts, and other documents throughout the year, your filing cabinet is probably quite full. Working from home means you still have to implement data protection protocols. Saving personal documents could open you up to identity theft. Regardless of why you have a ton of documents, it’s time to do a year-end purge. Scan what you want or need to keep, such as tax return documents that you can get rid of after a year. Only your tax filings should remain. You can get rid of all bills, receipts, bank statements, and other documents. But don’t just throw them away. After a purging, you need proper document destruction.
Shredding Purges
What can you put through the mobile shredding process, and what do you need to keep? You should keep a document retention schedule, which tells you when to shred certain documents. The document retention schedule lets you see at a glance which documents to shred.
- Box up random pieces of paper, such as those you used to take notes.
- Unless you keep your bank statements because you plan on applying for a mortgage or need to save them for a divorce, you can get rid of them after a year.
- Supporting documents for tax returns. You should keep the tax returns for up to seven years.
- Household bills.
- Old letters you no longer want to keep.
- Paid medical bills.
- Accounting documents that have reached the end of their retention time.
If you work at home, you should use your employer’s retention schedule. Box up any document that has expired. If you have digital media, such as USB drives, with information you no longer have to keep, box them up. You should also box up old hard drives. We can shred hard drives and other digital media.
Once you have collected everything you need to discard, contact Royal Document Destruction to make an appointment for shredding services.
Royal Document Destruction’s Shredding Solutions
Once you’ve gathered everything you need to shred, choose one of Royal Document Destruction’s shredding services. We can come to you with our mobile shredding truck, pick up shredding, or you can drop off shredding at our office.
When you use one of our services, you significantly reduce the chances of identity theft should someone break in and go through the documents in your office. If you have several boxes, our mobile shredding truck can come to your residence. Or, if it’s more convenient, we can pick up your shredding, or you can drop it off at the office.
Once we have completed shredding the documents and digital storage, you will receive a certificate of destruction to show that we shredded these items. If you work from home, your employer will need this proof. In the event that the employer suffers break in and someone steals paper or digital storage, your employer will have evidence that you had those items shredded.
Contact Royal Document Destruction
When you use a mobile shredding company, it is easier to keep your filing system from being overwhelmed with documents. And, it makes it easier to recycle since all of our shreds go to a paper recycling plant. Contact Royal Document Destruction today to make an appointment or discuss setting up a shredding schedule and locked shred boxes.
