Where Should You Store Your Contracts?

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One of the reasons why clients and other businesses do not want to work with a micro or small business is the danger to their privacy. Investors do not want their information and investment to be leaked out to the press. Businesses do not want the structure and design of their processes to be known by their rivals. So any potential leak of these things is going to damage them far more than it will you. One such area is contracts. Storing contracts safely is absolutely crucial, not just as a legal requirement but to protect yourself from a client or business partner. However, any document that has sensitive information is going to be worth something, and your employees and hackers should always be kept at arm’s length regarding access.

Away from prying eyes

Firstly, anyone who isn’t involved in the contract, should not know what the contract is about, for how long, and who is relevantly mentioned in the contract. This essentially means your employees should not know anything more than who the contract is with. Management, of course, needs to know as they must adhere to it when it comes to operational risks and activities.

So, right from the very beginning, you should ask management to not talk about the contract with anyone other than employees on or above their ranking. Secondly, you should try and have some measures and policies in place, which prevents or deters management from exposing contracts to employees. Keep it away from prying eyes. Nowadays everyone has a phone with a camera and one quick snap and your contract can be leaked.

Receive and store

No matter what kind of company you are, chances are you want to have physical copies of contracts as well as virtual copies that are on the cloud. This is why you need to have a PO box with web access. The box will be able to receive and store your contracts, and yet, give you access via their online service. Unbiased, totally responsible teams will be handling the documents, scanning them, and or printing them to send them to you. If you would like, they can also scan the documents and then destroy them. As part of their service, they prevent access to anyone who is not authorized to see them. So there may be a password and verbal authorization before giving access.

Not in the office

You never know what can happen after hours in the office, so you should not see it as a safe place to store contracts. You should try to keep them in your own home, in a safe which is fireproof. This way the contracts will always be safe, only you know where they are and they cannot be damaged by dust, dirt, or even a fire.

Contracts can and should be stored away from prying eyes. Employees not involved in those contracts should not even know what the content of them is. Not to mention, you can always use a virtual PO box to access and store your contracts.