Nothing has been agreed yet, but the proposals would affect 50,000 businesses a year and could start later this year – with the aim of bringing in up to £600m in fines for the government.

Initial plans see HMRC examining company records – including cheque stubs, till rolls, sales and takings records and bank and credit card statements among other things – with penalties imposed for records that are deemed not to be “accurate” or “adequate”. The clampdown may see SMEs being exposed to formal tax enquiries too.

Visit www.filestore.co.uk/hmrc-checks for more information.

Business South is free to attend, and provides a great opportunity to network with other established Hampshire businesses, to hear the very latest thinking in business innovation and growth, and to meet up with customers and suppliers alike. 

We would be delighted to see you there – please visit us in the Atrium (D5).

Our stand will be manned by Bob, Barry and Claire, and will offer advice on best practice in corporate records’ management, virtual tours of our purpose-built storage facilities, and the FileStore trademark gift of miniature archive boxes.

We hope to see you there!

Business South 2011

The Rose Bowl, Southampton

Wednesday 2nd March – 10am – 5pm

Thursday 3rd March – 10am – 4pm

To pre-register for free entry to attend the region’s key business to business show visit www.business2businessshows.com.

Maintaining your own onsite filing area can be an expensive business. With prime office rental ranging from £20 per sq.ft. to £100 in the South of England, the (hidden) cost of retaining documents onsite is not insignificant. Furthermore, whilst scanning is touted as paper’s nemesis, it is a costly and often inappropriate alternative. The comfort and convenience of hard-copy is something that is not easily overcome. The first thing I do when reviewing an email, tender or contract is print it off, so that I can scrawl (typically illegible) notes in the margins!

So it is right to question whether your offices are being occupied by files that no longer need to be kept. Constant document review and a rolling destruction program is the first step to efficient document management. However, as with all things regulatory, this is not as straightforward as it would seem – different types of files have different retention schedules.

Payroll and salary records, for example, must be kept for 6 years, whilst personnel files must be stored for 7 years after employment ends. The premature disposal of certain corporate records can lead to prosecution, so it is always prudent to check before you shred!

Many of our customers have a specific document retention policy – some of which we have available here at FileStore. However, as a guide to regulatory requirements, FileStore has published a free generic Retention Schedule, which can be downloaded at http://www.filestore.co.uk/want-to-know-more/.

If your organisation would like to post your own retention policy on our website – either to help other customers, or as a reference point for your own staff – please just email it across to us (enquiries@filestore.co.uk).

As you all know, FileStore is always happy to provide best practice records’ management advice whenever we can – if we don’t know the answer to your question, the chances are that we will know of another customer that will! If you do have a specific query, please get in touch. That is what we are here for!

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The snow (which was a foot deep in some parts) gave Chalcroft a crisp, white blanket, covering our fleet of vans, and chilling us poor South Coast Softies to the bone! But invoking the true British bulldog spirit, we pulled together and battled onwards.

Below are a few snaps from the first day the snow fell, including an incriminating shot of our own Gordie Dolan throwing the first snowball….

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The purpose of this blog is to provide our customers with information relating to the most important developments in the records’ management industry, not least the frequent changes in retention legislation. We will also be using it to give you an insight into the inner workings of FileStore, so that you can see what we get up to on a day-to-day basis.

We appreciate comments and look forward to hearing from you all.

Keeping track of FileStore is easy. Use our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or check in on our Facebook page.

We also produce a Newsletter which you can sign up for here.

If there are any topics you would like to see us discuss on our blog, please comment below or drop us an email at enquiries@filestore.co.uk.

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