Designing a Records Retention Plan

Reducing Risk For The Life Cycle of Your Information

Crown Information Management is a Florida based, locally owned and operated, secure information management service and proud member of The Better Business Bureau. Our goals are simple; to operate our services with the security and privacy our clients expect and to give you accurate assurances, on keeping our services, at the forefront of best practices.

One of the most misunderstood topics in Records Information Management is the essential role of records retention scheduling. Conjecture and supposition can threaten an organization’s compliance with legal and business requirements. To avoid this, organizations need to develop and implement a sound records retention action plan. Listed below are suggestions to help implement or review your Records Retention Plan:

Establish criteria for identifying official records.
The criteria should provide concrete, specific guidelines to support daily decision making, but stay flexible enough to provide for the exceptions that happen in an active business environment.
Develop a policy authorizing destruction of non-record materials.
In order to facilitate regular, timely purging of materials that are no longer useful, non-records shouldn’t require much more than the policy itself to authorize their destruction.
Research and tabulate retention requirements from all applicable statutes and regulations.
Records retention requirements can be direct – explicit requirements to keep a given record for a specified period of time – or indirect, in the form of legal limitation periods.
Investigate operational needs.
The creators and users of records should play a role in identifying how long records are needed to inform administrative processes and operational activities, possibly in excess of legally mandated requirements.
Apply archival appraisal, selection and sampling techniques.
These processes can be integrated into retention schedule development, identifying upfront which categories of records have potential archival value.
Establish the retention schedule.
Industry-recognized standards in records management recommend that categories be based on the business activities that give rise to their creation or receipt. Those same activities will help identify applicable legal, operational and archival requirements.
Retention requirements for each category should be long enough to meet all identified requirements, but not so long as to introduce privacy non-compliance, undue storage costs or other risks.
Implement disposal processes.

Records should be reviewed regularly against retention schedules to identify their eligibility for destruction. The review should include input from stakeholders who can identify possible legal or operational reasons to retain records in excess of their scheduled retention periods. Those stakeholders should sign-off on actual records destruction, which should be performed in a secure manner and be certified as having been performed in accordance with organizational retention policies.

Document Destruction

Crown Information Management is Florida’s Premier choice for destruction. Our team will walk you through your choices of service and answer any questions you may have about the process.

Hard Drive Destruction

Crown Information management is NAID certified in both on and offsite destruction. We have policies and procedures in place to protect and support your chain of custody.

Media Destruction

Trust Crown Information Management to completely destroy your unwanted media material such as CDs and DVDs and render it unusable.

Product Destruction

Crown Information Management can arrange for the collection, transportation, secure destruction and disposal of all product destruction material.

Office Equipment Destruction

Electronic equipment that is no longer usable or is outdated is recycled through an advanced process that separates raw materials.

X-Ray Destruction

Crown Information Management will dispose of this confidential information properly to protect patients, doctors and the environment.

Records Storage

Crown Information Management understands the importance of record storage as a vital piece to the records management system. We can act as a resource for your company, in the classification and preparation of a records management program.

Document Scanning Services

The expertly trained and HIPAA compliant document scanning teams at Crown Information Management guarantee that your documents are picked up, secured, prepped, scanned, and converted into the digital format you need. Handwritten documents… no problem!

Records Indexing

Crown Information Management understands how overwhelming the process of tagging and indexing records can feel. Our professionally trained staff is available to assist you in the indexing of your records

Vital & Important Records

Creating a Vital Records Program should be part of your organizations business strategy, as well as, having a procedure in place, to compliment your Business Continuity & Disaster Plan. Crown Information Management can help!

Retention Schedules

Crown Information Management can act as a resource for your company, in the classification and preparation of a records management program. This description is provided, to give you an understanding of the basics of Records Management or (RM).