1. Mobile Document Shredding Service – 10 Good Reasons to Hire a Professional Paper Shredder
Thanks to new laws passed by the government, creating a document shredding plan have become a part of doing business. This is to keep non-public information handled by businesses and organizations secure and to prevent identity theft. However, some companies still shred paper themselves. In this article, we’ll look at 10 good reasons why it is a good idea to hire a mobile document shredding services offering companies to handle this work for you.
- Ease of Use – Mobile shredding services companies provide clients with secure locking containers. When sensitive materials need to be disposed of, they can simply be dropped in the locked console, rather than having to shred them individually. Forget removing staples, paper-clips or bindings…With high volume capabilities, you can toss huge folders of paperwork into shredding trucks and they are shredded beyond recognition in seconds!
- Cost Efficiency – Shredding trucks shred paper faster and have much more capacity than any regular in-house shredding machine can provide. If you were to assign an employee to do this task, it would cost your company more than hiring a shredding company. It is even more cost-effective than having a minimum wage employee do the shredding, let alone someone who gets paid good wages. Why waste the time of talented employees by making them stand over a shredding machine? Also, shredding machines are not cheap, and can require repairs if used a lot.
- The FTC Safeguards Rule of the GLB Act mandates that private data be monitored for destruction. Most mobile shredding services have observation screens where you can watch the papers being shredded. You are also provided with a certificate of destruction. Other services, such as recyclers can easily lose your papers on the way to the recycling plant. They pay little attention to the security of your data. Why increase your legal exposure and risk huge fines for improperly disposing of private data?
- It’s An Ethical Business Practice. Do you really want papers your customers’ or clients’ non-public information blowing in the wind? Think of how bad you would feel if your customer data was stolen because you were too lazy to take simple precautions…Not to mention the huge PR damage your business could take.
- With A Shredding Service, You Get Major Help From Pros Let’s face it…Compliance with all of the various shredding laws is not always simple. There are many laws and it can be hard to decipher all of the various sources of information. When you hire a shredding company, you get years of experience behind you.
- The Environment. It’s good to know shredded paper is baled and ends up in paper products like those coarse paper towels you wipe your hands within public bathrooms. Many shredding companies sell the bits of paper to paper mills and it is recycled into new paper products.
- Better Than ‘Off-Site’ Destruction On-site shredding is way more secure. You can actually see the paper being shredded first hand before it leaves your property. By having it done on-site, you eliminate all of the possible risks of exposing your data in its complete form after it leaves your premises.
- Self Interest & Competitive Advantage. Many business secrets have been lost to improper handling of important information. Keep your competitive advantage by keeping your data private! Corporate dumpster divers have cost companies millions. With a secure mobile shredding service, you can eliminate (or minimize) risk of competitors and make more money.
- Organization By organizing your papers and creating a shredding schedule, your home or business can become more efficient. Shredding papers saves tons of storage space and frees up room for more important office equipment.
- Peace of mind – Without the proper safeguards, information ends up in the dumpster where it is readily, and legally, available to anybody.
Article source: ezinearticles.com
2. Benefits Of Mobile Document Shredding Service
Mobile document shredding services companies come to the physical location of your business and take care document disposal for you. These services typically use a medium-size truck with the shedding device built into the back of the vehicle. This is so the shredder can go to the company location and shred all the documents on-site before taking the particles to the dumping area for final disposal.
What are the benefits of mobile document shredding services?
Containers: Many shredding companies furnish nice looking steel locking containers for use in your office. These containers can be emptied on schedule, or whenever they get full. Many mobile shredding companies offer flexible scheduling.
Certification: You may get a “Certificate of Destruction”. While this certificate doesn’t totally absolve the business of responsibility for the document security, it does help.
Ease Of Use: Why risk transporting tons of documents off-site when you can witness the document destruction in the back of the truck right outside your office!
Unrecoverable: The professional process used by mobile shredding companies makes it impossible to reconstruct documents.
Affordable: It can cost only pennies per pound to shred business documents.
Verified Firsthand: Company personnel can witness the shredding is done on-site. You don’t have to entrust the drivers and a chain of people to destroy your documents…you can witness it firsthand without leaving your office parking lot!
Less time consuming: Shredding these documents by hand would waste valuable employee-hours. With a mobile shredding service, huge piles of documents can be shredded in a fraction of the time.
Mobile shredding is probably the easiest, most secure, and most rest free way of disposing of documents.
Some of the service options frequently offered by mobile document shredding services companies:
Ongoing scheduled service
One time bulk shredding.
Onsite shredding
Offsite plant-based shredding
One time purges
Electronic destruction / Recycling
Daily, weekly, monthly, and semimonthly (or, biweekly) schedule
For a company, it can be a good investment to hire a mobile shredder to come to the site regularly and dispose of sensitive documents. After all, it can cost a lot of money to warehouse this type of data. Instead of documents sitting around collecting dust, a mobile shredder can make mincemeat of them with minimum hassle and clear the clutter.
Article source: applecapitalgroup.com
3. Cleaning Your Financial House: 4 Items to Keep and 4 to Shred
If you’re staring at piles of paperwork and wondering what’s safe to destroy and what you should hang onto, here are some guidelines.
Keep: tax returns. Save your returns for at least the past three years, and maybe more.
If you think (or know) you underreported a lot of income, keep six years’ worth of tax returns, Almonte advises. He adds that generally during an audit, the Internal Revenue Service will request the extra returns if you’ve underreported income by more than 25 percent.
And if you employ any domestic help, such as a nanny or a full-time housekeeper, “you should keep the employment records for four years after the tax was due and paid,” says Ernie Almonte, chairman of the National CPA Financial Literacy Commission. He also says, “There may be reasons other than tax reasons for keeping your records for a longer period. You should consult with an attorney if you have any ongoing or potential litigation.”
In other words, unless your taxes are simple and you know that there’s no chance of serious errors, you might as well hang onto your tax returns for at least a decade or more.
Shred: most receipts. Plenty of receipts can just be tossed in the trash rather than jammed in a shredder or ripped into pieces – it isn’t as if that receipt from Panera Bread has your Social Security number on it. But ideally, and if you’re methodical about your finances, you’ll keep all of your receipts for about a month before discarding them.
“For a bank account, ATM and credit card transactions, I recommend holding onto the receipts until the transactions are reflected on your statement. You can reconcile your statement against your receipts, and if reflected properly, then you can go ahead and shred the receipts,” says Melinda Kibler, a certified financial planner in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with Palisades Hudson Financial Group.
But there are exceptions. For instance, if you’ve purchased something big enough to insure, like a wedding ring, hang onto the receipt.
Keep: investment records. Not forever, but retain them at least as long as you own the investment, says Jake Loescher, a financial advisor at Savant Capital Management in Rockford, Illinois.
“Until you sell the fund, stock, bond or other security, it will be helpful to maintain these records to determine gain or loss upon sale, which ultimately determines the tax ramifications,” he says.
Of course, you may not need to keep paper copies of your investment records if your brokerage firm allows you to log into your account and view them electronically. Still, Loescher recommends, “Before you start trashing all these records, check with your various companies to see if these copies can be accessed electronically.”
Shred: some of your junk mail. As if junk mail isn’t annoying enough, you should destroy some of it rather than tossing it in the trash or recycling bin, says Brian Berson, founder, and CEO of FileThis Inc., an app that finds and organizes personal documents from your computer and some mobile devices. In particular, Berson recommends shredding pre-approved credit card applications.
Otherwise, typical junk mail can go into the round file as usual.
Keep: pay stubs. Like receipts, whether you keep pay stubs depends on your personality. Some people trust that the system involving employer, payroll company and IRS works, and usually, it does.
But if you don’t receive your checks via direct deposit, keep those pay stubs around for a year, Loescher suggests. “It’s helpful to double-check your total income received on a pay-period basis against the income reported to the IRS on your annual W-2,” he says.
Shred: bills. There are some exceptions, Loescher says. If you’re running a business out of your home, you may need the bills for tax purposes. Otherwise, you don’t need to keep these once they’re paid. Just remember to shred them so some enterprising identity thief won’t happen upon them.
Keep: mortgage-related papers. Bought a house? All of the paperwork you received at closing should live at your home, too. “Any documents related to the property you have purchased, including loan documentation, should be kept until you no longer own the property,” Kibler says.
And remember how there are exceptions to tossing receipts? Home improvement receipts are ones you should keep, Kibler and Loescher say. Someday you may want to show them to a potential home buyer.
Shred: digital media. Don’t forget your old laptop or the smartphone you’re replacing – those devices can have just as much important, financially attractive information to a criminal as your paperwork. You can’t push an old computer through a personal shredder, but Berson says you could hire a professional service to destroy your old devices. “These days, most shredding services can destroy digital media,” he says.
Article source: money.usnews.com
