Importance Of Deposit Safes

By Author: Alan Trescott
Total Articles: 1
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If you run a business, even a small one from home then you need to ensure you look after and keep all of your critical documents such as invoices and bills in a safe place. Not only that, UK law states that some documents need to be kept for up to six years.
Many people, however, when asked where their last year's accounts are will happily just point to a shelve, take you to their garage or simply ruffle through their drawers to get you the information you need. Put simply, they're not stored anywhere safe and could be lost or stolen very easily.

Company documents are important and storing them safely is a legal requirement, not just a good idea. You should, the, consider putting them somewhere safe so that they cannot be simply picked up and taken out of the building, lost when someone decides to tidy up and burned to a crisp in a freak accident.

Here are some options to keep your documents safe:

Off-site storage - For larger companies this can be a great option. Very often a local storage company will offer a weekly or monthly pick-up service. You provide all your documents in a set format and they ...
... will take them to their secure storage facility.

Digital storage - This is becoming ever more popular, although the legality of digital-only documents is still in some doubt. A 'belts and braces' option would be to store your paper documents somewhere after first digitising them in some way. If you do this then you should really store your digital versions in a different place to the paper ones - spread the risk.

On-site storage - Realistically, this is the most common and cost effective way of storing your document. Simply keep them in one place in a secure position in the building. But don't just leave them in a simple filing cabinet, make sure you put them where they cannot be found easily and is secure.

Obviously there are greater risks to your paper documents than theft - the most common being fire. You should therefore consider a robust fire safe. You should also consider the possibility of heat damage and choose your safe accordingly.

Many safes don't actually give ratings for heat resistance and this can be a big issue for some companies. If you need to store sensitive data (anything plastic and of course, paper) then you don't just need to consider fire. Even if the fire doesn't go anywhere near the safe, you could find that the resulting smoke damage could destroy data media and plastic files.
But there's yet another problem - heat. Some safes, although fire resistant, will not tolerate heat as well as others and if your safe is in the middle of a blazing building then the fire itself may not be the issue. The heat that is generated in the middle of a fire can be many hundreds of degrees.

Firstly, your plastic items such as files, disks, tapes will melt and then eventually they'll simply burst into flames. If it gets hot enough, you could even see your paper ignite so when you eventually open up the supposedly ‘protected' safe - you just have ashes.
So, be careful with what you buy and spend wisely.

Alan Trescott is the marketing manager for the Safe Supermarket, an online retailer of office supplies and equipment to all sizes of business. They provide a wide range of data safes as well as fire, security and deposit safes.