Compliance Software: Records Management Disaster Prevention

The following experience stems from a situation that I faced as a small business owner. I started out with one employee, Michael. He was a fabulous C++ programmer that had a knack for innovative coding. I handled the business plan, accounting and sales, and he generated and maintained our software package. As the company grew, however, it became necessary to hire a secretary. She was very dedicated, and willing to work under small business conditions. Because we were trying to maintain a careful bottom line, she used her own personal laptop at work. Michael and I both used personal PC s as well.
As the company continued to evolve, we found ourselves producing a mountain of records and assorted documents. We had personal info records, client records, billing records, accounting records, sales records, etc, etc, etc. Even with an office network, I began to grow uneasy that documents were downloaded to desktops, edited, and never merged with the network originals. I felt the need for a compliance software, or a records management system, but ignored common sense because I thought it would be too expensive to justify the cost.
Fast forward three years and the company was still chugging along. We had a number of hires and fires, and eventually our original secretary had to leave. This is when the disaster struck. It turns out that a number of extremely sensitive corporate documents were on her PC when she left, unbeknownst to her. And unbeknownst to us, there weren t backups on the network. As Murphy s Law would have it, her hard drive malfunctioned beyond repair and left us in a lurch.
We recovered, but it cost us a phenomenal amount of money. Since then we ve been using a robust compliance software that almost nullifies my enterprise risk. I found it after taking this Document Retention Risk Assessment. I d recommend a compliance software for any business, large or small. It pains me to know that others are currently going through the same struggle. Unless, that is, they happen to be our competitors.



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