Classifying Records

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.

Just as the records of the organization come in a variety of formats, the storage of records can vary throughout the organization. There are two types of records, Active and Inactive. There are also two major classifications, Vital and Important.

An active record is a record needed to perform current operations, subject to frequent use, and usually located near the user. An inactive record is a record that is no longer needed to conduct current business but is being preserved until it meets the end of its retention period, such as when a project ends, a product line is retired, or the end of a fiscal reporting period or the legal retention requirement is reached. These records may hold business, legal, fiscal, or historical value for the entity in the future and, therefore, are required to be maintained for a short or permanent duration.

Records are managed according to the retention schedule. Once the life of a record has been satisfied according to its predetermined period and there are no legal holds pending, it is authorized for final disposition which may include secure document destruction, transfer, or permanent preservation.

Records may be formally and discretely identified by coding and housed in folders specifically designed for optimum protection and storage capacity, or they may be casually identified and filed with no apparent indexing. Organizations that manage records casually find it difficult to access and retrieve information when needed. The inefficiency of filing maintenance and storage systems can prove to be costly in terms of wasted space and resources expended searching for records. Another major benefit in managing your records effectively, will be the actual dollars saved.

While there are many purposes of and benefits to records management, a key feature of records is their ability to serve as evidence of an event. Proper records management can help preserve this feature of records. Records must be identified and managed, regardless of their form.