The Benefits of Professional Shredding Services Every Business Owner Should Know.
Business owners have a responsibility to protect the confidential information they obtain. Most companies are required to store documentation for a number of years, but after that, the documentation must be destroyed. Documents that fall into the wrong hands could lead to identity theft and liability exposure. Find the answers to your document shredding questions and see why a professional shredding service is a smart choice.
Why is Secure Document Shredding Important?
The main reason you should shred your business documents properly is to prevent sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. As you work with your clients, you will receive a chain of custody of their sensitive information. Your custodial responsibility is two-fold. You must first ensure private information is securely stored and inaccessible to unauthorized individuals. Secondly, when you no longer need to store these records, they should be destroyed in a manner where no sensitive data can be leaked.
Customer-Related Reasons for Professional Shredding Service
Liability risks increase substantially if a company fails to destroy business documents improperly. You could be sued for failing to protect your customer’s information. The type of documents you should ensure to protect are:
- Invoices/Sales Receipts
- Payment Information
- Account Information
- Names, Addresses, and Phone Numbers
Failure to secure information you gather risks damage to your client’s reputation or their own business operations. If you are a consultant working with a business on product development and the notes you’ve gathered from them are not properly destroyed, a competitor could get them and damage your client’s new product initiatives. This type of negligence is risky for you.
Use A Professional Shredding Service for Your Business Documents
Not only should you protect the information you receive from customers, but you should also protect the information within your own business. In fact, you may have much more of your own information to protect. Consider the types of documents you work with on a daily basis that has sensitive information on them.
Tax Records
Business tax records reveal a lot of key information about your business that you should protect. Your business earnings are listed, information about losses, and costs of expenditures. If this information falls into the wrong hands, this increases the chances of identity theft because your ownership information is listed as well.
Bank Records
The consequence of bank records in the wrong hands is a no-brainer. Your bank accounts are the bloodline of your operations. A bank statement that is simply tossed in a trash bin can land in an unsafe place. Include them in a professional document shredding service plan.
Personnel Records
Personnel records are also very important to destroy professionally. As an employer, you’ll have social security documents, tax documents, health-related documents and other pertinent information that belong to your employees.
Accounting and Financial Records.
Protect the proprietary nature of your business through proper disposal of your financial statements. Like your taxes, your financial statements identify what is happening with your business. These records identify how you are investing in your business to keep it profitable. If these fall into the hands of a competitor, you could risk losing your competitive advantage.
How a Professional Shredding Service Can Help
Professional shredding services vary in service models. For the small business owner, you may only accumulate a small number of documents that required secure destruction only a few times a month or quarter. There are services that will take your documents and shred them on your behalf and ensure that those documents never exist again.
Shredding documents can take away from the time you need to grow your business. A shredding service benefits you by removing that task from you while you or your employees invest those quality hours into making new sales.
If a professional shredding service comes to you to pick up documents, they provide a secure method for collecting documents and transporting them to a facility where they will be destroyed. If you bring them into a shredding service that specializes in smaller volumes, you will get the same benefit in time savings.
Have Your Documents Professionally Shredded With Us
If you have boxes of documents or only a stack, our shredding service can help you. Bring them to us and we will securely shred them for you. We will also schedule a pickup. Contact us to begin securely shredding your documents.