As energy prices rise, businesses will likely be thinking about how to cut back on their usage. Big Four accountancy firm PwC famously decided to close its offices for the first time this Christmas to save money. Closing offices will save energy, but for many businesses following these steps, if staff are being sent to work from home for the first time, the likelihood is that they will need to purchase equipment to allow staff to carry out their jobs such as laptops, desks, office chairs and monitors and ensure they have all the software they need to work remotely. This will take up a great amount of time, money and resources. It’s also important to determine how shifting to work from home would affect your staff. If you do decide to pass on energy bill costs to them, consider the impact this could have on them.
If you’ve exhausted the “easy wins”, why not think about removing paper storage from your office? The average office dedicates 18% of its space to paper storage – that’s a lot of space being heated up needlessly, especially with energy prices having risen by 66.7% and gas prices by 129.4% in the 12 months to January 2023, according to the Office of National Statistics.
Many businesses waste lots of office space on paper storage; some even have entire archive rooms full of paper that is never accessed and just kept for retention reasons. If this is the case, why are you wasting money heating rooms full of paper? Off-site storage will free up your valuable office space, allowing you to downsize your office space, potentially saving on both rent and energy costs. It can take a lot of energy to heat a large office, so think of the space and energy costs you would save getting rid of storage in your office. At Storetec, our specialist facilities provide a more environmentally friendly way to store paper, saving you money and doing better for the environment at the same time.
Benefits of off-site storage
As well as saving on energy and storage costs, there are other benefits of storing your documents off-site:
Increase office space – Free up your valuable office space. It is always at a premium with every business. With your archive in storage, it frees up valuable office space and makes your organisation more agile. With the increase in hybrid working and hot-desking, there may be an opportunity to even downsize your office space requirements.
Accessibility – In case you need urgent access to your information, does the storage provider offer a fast Scan-on-Demand service? In most cases, you just need to see the information on your documents to answer that important question or query. Using our records management system i-Trac, at the click of a button, you can request a retrieval for documentation required for an audit, HMRC request, or HR issue. On receipts of request, Storetec will retrieve, digitise and transfer the scanned documents to you within just eight working hours. Having the documents scanned and returned electronically gives you all the benefits of document scanning without the upfront digitisation costs. It also means you don’t have to worry about having an office full of archive boxes again.
Manage document retention periods – Having an archive retention procedure is not only important for regulatory compliance but also ensures that you’re not paying unnecessary storage costs for records which have surpassed their retention. Most reputable off-site storage providers will provide you access to a records management system like i-Trac. With i-Trac you can apply indexing data and run custom searches to identify boxes that have passed their retention dates. You can then request these boxes to be shredded in line with British Standards, all in a couple of clicks.
Security and protection – Your storage provider’s facilities should be designed with a number of security features to give the best possible protection for your documents. These should include internal and external CCTV, monitored fire and intruder alarms, and restricted access control. You should also request to visit the facility to see your own boxes. Many companies have been caught out in the past by suppliers telling them they had the latest, more secure facilities when in reality, the truth was very different. If you are not allowed to visit, don’t give them your boxes.
We have spoken about i-Trac Records Management System, but what is it? Specifically designed by Storetec to give businesses full visibility and control over their paper documents in storage, i-Trac allows you to manage retention periods, schedule collections for additional boxes to be placed into storage, and make Scan-on-Demand or physical retrieval requests for any boxes in storage, to name a few, without having to rely on anyone else to arrange this for you.
Do you have a storage project in mind, just like to explore the options, or are interested in learning more about how storing your archive off-site can save your business time and money? Get in touch with us at Storetec. We are available for calls at your convenience and can even visit your site for a no-obligation, free on-site audit of your archive to see what needs to be kept or what can be securely shredded in line with British Standards.
