Skip to main content

How long do I keep this stuff?

I developed this over the course of some other work I'm doing. I found that I needed to distill the very (overly?) comprehensive documents out there. Of course this is not comprehensive, however, if you use a boilerplate policy, you’ll find yourself bogged in in how long to keep your supply chain FIFO documents. Most small organizations don’t get into this level of complexity.

Financial records, 7 years. Pretty much everything related to routine money maintenance is kept for this period. This extends to any kind of contract or lease. If space is scarce, look into scanning your old papers. This will help focus you on what’s important and what’s not. And computer memory is cheaper than real estate! If you have developed charts of accounts or depreciation schedules, you should keep those forever. Ditto for depreciation schedules, bills of sale and end-of-year financial statements.

Keep any insurance information or legal information for 7 years.

Keep employment applications and post-termination employee records for a period of three years.

Keep your routine correspondence for 1 year. That means you get to have a purge fest once a year. Try lighting a fire and burning an effigy.

Keep anything foundational forever. By this I mean Articles of Incorporation, Charters, Bylaws (each version should be kept), IRS determination letters that prove nonprofit status, etc. If you don’t have these you should do a little research and recreate them. For example, the Articles of Incorporation can be found on file with your state’s Secretary of State.

FWIW

Popular posts from this blog

We've Always Done it That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change

From what I can tell, the impetus for this book was that the folks who wrote it, Jeff De Cagna , David Gammel , Jamie Notter , Mickie Rops and Amy Smith , were “concerned by the instinctively conservative approach to organizational stewardship that far too many association executives and volunteers continue to pursue in the early years of the 21 st century.” I took notes throughout the book, and now I realize they are far too extensive to make a very good book review. And I am definitely the choir that this book is preaching to. However, I really, really liked the problems these folks addressed and they pretty much slaughtered and butchered several sacred cows. This book is not extensive narrative or heavily footnoted, but it is based on the collective experience of 5 people who together have worked with many different organizations, and the collective themes will be familiar to anyone in the field. On a meta level, this book takes observations of what’s happening in the
Read more

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.
Read more

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of "
Read more