How to reduce costs through offsite storage
September 9, 2009
Although it’s 20 years since the advent of the paperless office, the number of hard copy records continues to grow. The resulting volume of paper documents quickly fills space allocated to file storage and soon converts otherwise empty offices into archive storage rooms. Businesses of all size inadvertently end up with storage boxes under desks and around every corner of the office.
Offsite storage of business records is a simple and proven way of reducing business costs and improving profitability. Running out of space is often the catalyst to looking for offsite storage - fortunately, the reductions in total cost and improvements in business processes make offsite archive storage a compelling alternative to management of records in-house:
Free office space
Commercial office space is expensive to lease and rental rates have exhibited steady long term growth. With Sydney prime office rents around $700 psm pa, offsite document storage can generate savings in rent alone of up to 90% versus storing in-house.
Choosing offsite storage has strategic benefits as there is no longer a need to estimate and provide for space for ever increasing archives. You then have options to sublet surplus space, hand back space to a landlord at lease renewal, or perhaps avoid needing to relocate to larger premises.
Increase revenue
In-house management of records consumes an inordinate amount of time and is a continued distraction from higher value-added activities.
Offsite storage of business records frees space for revenue earning activities such as employing additional revenue generating staff. It can also free management from any involvement in day-to-day archiving activities and longer term planning for archiving space, staff and shelving.
Free staff from archiving
Archiving is generally the least liked, most inefficient and error prone office function. Managing records in-house consumes valuable staff time in storing, moving, retrieving, re-filing and, should they ever find the time, purging obsolete records. There are indirect costs too from the inefficiencies of working around boxes stored in every corner of the office, and the difficulties in locating records cause delays to internal processes and unnecessary increases in staff costs.
Reduce OH&S risks
Heavy boxes piled high around a commercial office present a real and unnecessary risk to staff welfare. Hazards include:
general lifting hazard
lifting above shoulders
trip and fall
collapsing boxes
risk of hand injury from binders and filing pins inside box handles
Offsite archive storage greatly reduces these risks.
Improve record keeping
Moving to offsite storage is an excellent opportunity to create or to validate a central inventory or database of all records in storage.
Searching for required documents is then simple and done from your desktop as against crawling over and around boxes looking for information scrawled on the front or top of at time inaccessible boxes.
Improve speed and reliability of access to records
With offsite storage, retrieval is no longer reliant upon the availability of your staff. Simply ask for required documents, files or boxes and they are delivered to your office.
Offer - No-obligation review and cost comparison
Contact us to see if offsite storage can help reduce your firm’s business costs and improve profitability.
We’ll start with a no-obligation review of your existing practices. We’ll then provide an archiving services proposal including a cost comparison to your existing arrangements.
No matter the state of your in-house archives, there’s generally nothing for you to do in preparation for us - we take care of all aspects of preparing and migrating your records to offsite.
Offer - 20 free archive boxes
A pack of 20 of our heavy duty archive boxes is yours free just for arranging a no-obligation review and comparison - value $77. Call us on 1300 880 830 and make sure you mention this offer.