It’s tax season again, and once again I’m asking myself “When will I set up a good Records Management System”?
A good Records Management system is not only a time saver from a personal perspective, but it is a necessity for the Business Enterprise. I thought that I would share some facts I found pertinent to Records Management.
- Paperwork is the largest overhead expense in any organization
- Active files typically grow at a rate of about 25% annually
- Managers spend an average of 4 weeks a year searching for or waiting on misfiled, mislabeled, untracked, or “lost” information
- Office workers can waste up to two hours a day looking for misplaced paperwork
- 90% of records, once filed, are never referred to again
- 95% of references are to records less than 3 years old
- Two thirds of records in organizations without records management may be removed from offices and either destroyed as being obsolete or transferred to lower-cost offsite facilities
- At any given time, between 3 and 5 percent of an organization’s files are lost or misplaced
- The average cost of recreating a one-page document is $180
- Companies typically misfile 2% to 7% of their paper and electronic records
- Computer users spend 7.5% of their time on a PC looking for files
- 67% of data loss is directly related to user blunders, making them 30 times more menacing than viruses and the leading cause of data loss
- 30% of paperwork is useless and could be eliminated; and 37% of photocopies made are unnecessary
- Large organizations lose a document every 12 seconds
- Some estimate that about 90 percent of all white-collar activities focus on information-related activities (e. g, creating, storing, retrieving, distributing)
- One study found that in a single year, records management saved a university $667,882 – in source and filing equipment alone – after subtracting the program’s budget
- At any given time, between 3 and 5 percent of an organization’s files are lost or misplaced. The average cost of recreating a document is $180. Annual losses for a Fortune 1000 company with one million files is $5 million dollars (Information Week)
83% of all business documents consist of forms. Businesses spend $1 billion a year designing and printing forms but $25-35 billion a year filing, storing, and retrieving them, and some $65-85 billion processing, maintaining, and distributing them. You may also put all documents in the cloud for faster recovery and maintenance. Visit https://venyu.com/cloud/ for more information.
The Myth of the Paperless Office (2002)
Are Records Really Valuable? In trying to resurrect Iraq’s oil industry, authorities discovered that seismic charts for 200,000 kilometers of land were destroyed. Each chart cost approximately $15,000 to create. The value of the records? $3 billion. Newsweek July 21, 2003
Some interesting facts. I wonder how much personal time and expense I could save by setting up my personal records management! How much time and expense can be saved within the Business Enterprise?