Efficiency
A professional paper shredder means you don't have to waste any time training your employees, fixing your shredder, or actually shredding anything. You get a container, you put the things that need to go away in the container, and we take care of the rest. No matter how large your facility, no matter how much paper you generate, our trucks can handle the workload. We can shred paper literally a hundred times more quickly than an employee with an office shredder -- why waste your time?
Improve Productivity
Along those same lines, those employees that aren't wasting their time shredding documents have that time that they can put toward more productive pursuits. Additionally, the security of our proven methods makes sure that your employees aren't inclined to waste their time poking through other people's records for something interesting to happen upon.
Security
Of course, it's not just the internal employees you're protecting the documents from. Outsiders going through your trash to look for corporate secrets or for people's personal information to defraud are going to have a much harder time of that when none of that sensitive information ever makes it into the trash.
Money
Because it takes your employees realistically a hundred times longer than it takes us to shred the same amount of paperwork, it's easy to reach the point where you save money by contracting with us versus paying your own employees to slowly labor through the same job that we do in minutes.
Space
Unless you stay carefully on top of your shredding, it's easy to end up with a backlog of shredding jobs taking up valuable real estate inside of your facility. The other option is to have us come out an clean all that mess up for you in an afternoon -- which do you think is better for business in the long run?
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( 0 / 0 )Identity theft is one of the most common white-collar crimes in the world, and it behooves any young business to get onto the shredding bandwagon as early as possible to avoid falling victim to this crime of opportunity. See, most identity thieves don't spend day after day hunting for an identity to steal (though some do!) Most identity thieves simply happen across a document that has valuable information on it and exploit that information for their own advantage.
Like a lock that keeps honest people honest, paper shredding services eliminate that happenstance. All you need to do it make sure you shred the right documents at the right times.
Receipts -- every receipt your business gets has scraps of information that can be used against your company. You're required by law to keep these documents for a set period of time for tax audit purposes (seven years in the USA), after which they should be shredded immediately.
Tax Returns -- Tax documents that aren't relevant to future potential audits, including most tax return records (which the IRS already has on file), should be shredded as soon as you receive them.
Rental/Mortgage Paperwork -- You need to keep these documents around until you move out of the building and/or own it outright, at which point these documents should be shredded as well.
Junk Mail -- Yep, even the junk mail your business gets can have nuggets of compromising information, particularly credit card offers and similar items. All junk mail should be shredded as soon as you recognize it for what it is.
Medical Records -- It's not often that you'll get medical records for an employee, but it is sometimes necessary. If that is the case, don't keep them around for longer than necessary, as they can be exploited by con men who get their hands on them.
Utility Bills -- If you need to keep them for tax deductions, keep these around for a year and then shred them; otherwise, take care of them the day they're paid (or immediately if you have your bills on automatic EFT.)
Bank Statements -- Ideally, you'll already be on electronic statements, but if you must have paper statements, shred one as soon as you obtain the next.
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( 0 / 0 )Sensitive information presents one of the greatest challenges to modern businesses. The average business could very easily leak information like a sieve -- from mom-and-pop dairies to nationwide video-rental corporations, I've personally worked for businesses that had huge exposure to risks they have no idea they were exposed to. The dairy used to just crumple its papers up and throw them in the circular file. The national video-rental chain shredded its papers religiously, but only after leaving them unattended on a publicly accessible counter for a day or more.
In the case of the dairy, the papers could have revealed to anyone who cared to check that they were selling raw milk on the sly to a small group of customers who were into the health benefits of the stuff. The video rental chain used to leave customers' names, addresses, phone numbers, and in some cases their bank account numbers out where people could write them down and walk away without anyone being the wiser.
So: what's your business' shredding policy? Are you risking your competitors learning your edge and using it against you? Are you risking a lawsuit because your sloppy practices allowed a vendor or client's identity to be stolen?
Do you do your shredding in-house? Do you use a strip shredder? A multi-shredder? A bale shredder? How secure are the documents before they're shredded? Who can get their hands on them, and how long are they available for? Could a too-clever and not-ethical-enough employee copy the information before the papers are shredded?
Or do you outsource your business to a paper shredding company that takes care of your shredding for you? Do they provide you a secure container that you can deposit your documents in (to prevent that unethical employee from abusing the paper in plain sight)? Do they have a truck capable of feeding the papers straight from the bin into a shredder without having to have anyone handle them? Does the shredder pack the paper into bales with no legible text remaining? Do they take the bales straight to a recycling plant so no one has the chance to reassemble the decimated mess?
These are the questions that you should be asking about your business' shredding policy, not just for your clients' protection, but for your own.
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( 0 / 0 )You've made an important business decision: rather than pay for shredders and the time and personnel to use them on a regular basis, you're going to sign a contract with a paper shredding company and have them take care of the old documents for you. It's a solid business decision that protects your business as well as your customers -- but how do you find a great paper shredding company to work with?
Most paper shredding companies have the same basic process. They have a flatbed truck with a massive paper shredder in it -- usually a crosscut shredder, but some use paper grinders or other shredders that make paper even less recoverable than a crosscut does. Unless you're dealing with the social security numbers of multimillionaires or issues of national security, a crosscut shredder is more than enough -- particularly because most shredding companies then take the paperwork directly to a landfill and drop it off, preventing all but the most dedicated of criminals from having a chance at getting their hands on it.
So assuming that security is more or less identical between all of the shredding services, what factors are there to take into account?
Frequency of Stops
If the papers are basically guaranteed secure once the shredding company gets ahold of them, they're at their most vulnerable when they're in your hands -- so a shredder that stops by once a month is leaving you at much more risk than one that stops by twice a week. Alternately, if you have a company that stops by based on the volume of papers you've built up, a truck that visits at 40 lbs of shred-stuff is better than one that only comes if you have 200 lbs or more to take care of. Ideally, you'll be able to find a company that stops by on your schedule rather than theirs, but companies like that tend to be significantly pricier, which leads to point number two:
Cost
Paper shredding services is a surprisingly competitive industry. Some companies try to set themselves apart by having more advanced kinds of paper shredder, but that's usually an unnecessary expense (as above). Others sell themselves based on more advanced levels of customer service, like picking up your shredding whenever you prefer -- but that's also not often as valuable as it sounds. In general, unless you're dealing with a fly-by-night company that doesn't actually do what they promise, you don't sacrifice much by paying ten or twenty less bucks a month for your shredding.
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( 0 / 0 )Secure, no-frills paper shredding of both paper and 'hard' computer storage -- like CDs and stiffy disks -- is an absolute necessity for any business or nonprofit organization that handles sensitive information on a regular basis...which is pretty much all of them. Even if you run something innocent like a florist, you collect your customers' addresses, names, phone numbers, and other information that a nefarious type could easily use against them -- much less checks that have your customers' routing and bank account numbers written on them.
In addition, you have to protect your own business. Not only can your business have it's identity stolen just like any other entity, you might also have competitors that would love to know how you get your raw materials or other secrets that would give you an edge against the pack.
So pretty much everyone needs to make sure their records get properly shredded. What are the advantages of running a shredding operation in-house versus through a contractor?
In-House
An in-house shredder has the advantage of being able to shred things on-the-spot, whenever the organization is done with them. One advantage of a business that needs an in-house shredding system: a movie rental business. Often, such businesses have to shred old DVDs that they no longer have a legal right to rent, and if they can't destroy them in-house with witnesses that are employees of the business, they can be held liable for someone else's mistakes.
Contracted Shredding
If you're not one of the rare businesses that has a legal obligation to shred in-house, the advantages of contracted shredding make it a fairly obvious choice. With a contracted shredder, your business is given a container that you can't open -- any document you're done with goes in the container, where it's not just sitting around waiting for a crime of opportunity to happen. The contractor then shreds the paper without ever glancing at it, packs it into bales with thousands of similar documents all mixed together, and takes it to a recycling plant to be taken care of -- all without anyone putting eyes on it.
The security inherent in a product-and-paper shredding company's process makes it a clear choice for basically any organization's shredding needs.
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