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From the owner to the summer intern, all employees are responsible for making sure that business information is accurate, clearly legible, and factual. In one way or another, all members of staff come into contact with administrative records, and this is where an understanding is needed for record management to be carried out at a high standard.
So-called ‘lower level’ employees are too often forgotten about when it comes to their inclusion in education and training activities around record management, suggesting it’s a problem above their pay grade. However, these employees the front line for the business and your first line of defence against compliance breaches. It’s for this reason that everyone needs to be aware about how to manage records effectively, resulting in an efficiently run business all round.
By creating an environment where employees feel a shared accountability, you are creating a compliance culture. If you expect your employees to take record management seriously, it’s important that the push starts from the top and works down through all ranks of the workforce.
By fostering a culture where employees are kept up to date and empowered to manage records safely, your workplace’s attitude towards compliance will change for the good. Rather than being seen as a chore, it is just accepted as the way information should be kept.
By fostering good records management, the business benefits as a whole. The goal of records management is not to create unnecessary filing and bureaucracy, but to streamline and standardise processes and keep business operations in order.

Individual Positions of Responsibilities
Although everyone in the organisation is responsible for record keeping, to ensure that standards are met, there are individual positions that take the lead:
Managers and supervisors need to start the push for good record management. By making sure the heads of the business are prioritising it, then the rest of your employees will follow.
Record proprietors determine which records will be created, gathered, and maintained. From there, they produce documents needed for audit checks and other compliance procedures. This position could be one in its own right, or could fall to management. For larger organisations with multiple record filing systems, there may be more than one person taking responsibility.
Record custodians maintain, secure, and care for records in accordance with company guidelines. This individual is the manager of a unit assigned to the role by the record proprietor. In some cases the record proprietor and record custodian may be the same person, and there could actually be more than one custodian.
Local records management coordinators create, publish, and maintain local record-retention schedules. A retention schedule is a policy that defines how long records must be kept and provides disposal guidelines for how data items should be discarded.
The Benefits of Effective Records Management:

• Helps you to do your job better by increasing the ease and efficiency of work, you can find the information you need quickly, allowing you to get on with your work
• Increases your accountability by providing evidence of what has happened in the past, offering up clear information that can be used if problems occur
• Increases company efficiency by making sure that you’re only keeping records you need
• Gives you records you can rely on by giving you records of a high value if they’re ever needed as evidence due to their standards in validity, accuracy, and relevance
• Shows you’re following legislation by complying to the expected standards

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These three terms can often be thrown around willy-nilly, but there is a difference between them. All three are relevant in the process of record management, so making sure you know what everything means really is vital.
The importance of records management cannot be stressed enough, with the benefits being that the general efficiency of the business is increased through an organised and easy system to work with. Additionally, the accountability of the company is better off, reducing the chances of problems occurring in the future, as well as allowing you to avoid penalty fines from the HM Revenue and Customs.
So as you can see, good record management results in a well-run business, as well as no added financial strain through fines and legislation issues. This is why understanding the keywords involved in the process is something you shouldn’t ignore.
What is “Data”?
Data is just facts and figures. This can be a set of value of a qualitative or quantitative variable, in other words – data that can either be measured in numbers or not. For example, the population of a town over the last 250 years would be quantitative data, whilst the colour of the sky is qualitative data.
While the concept of data can commonly be linked with scientific research, it’s actually collected by a huge range of organisations and institutions. Businesses collect data on sales, revenue, profits, and stock prices, whilst the government use data on crime figures, and employment/literacy rates.
Data is measured, collected, reported, and analysed, from there it can be used for graphs, images or other analysis tools.

What is “Information”?
Information is something that provides the answer to a question of some kind or resolves uncertainty. It is linked closely to data and knowledge, which is why the terms can often be confused.
Information can be encoded into various forms for transmission and interpretation, it can also be encrypted for safe storage and communication.
It also reduces uncertainty. This sounds very cryptic, but the uncertainty of an event is measured by its probability of occurrence and is inversely proportional to that. The more uncertain that an event is, the more information is required to resolve the uncertainty of that event.
For example, if you record the population of a town over 10 years, those figures are data, but if you find from these figures that the population has been increasing/decreasing, then this revelation is information.
What is a “Record”?
A record is anything that supports the business such as business decisions, policy documents and approval documents. This includes emails, paper documents or electronic files that provide evidence of business activity.
Data and information can then be held as a record both physically in a book, or electronically in a computer file. Most of the information you use in day-to-day working life will be classed as a record as a result.
 

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Keeping good records is vital for a business of any size. However, figures suggest that UK businesses are far from setting a good example when it comes to record-keeping. HM Revenue and Customs found that until January 2012, 39% of businesses inspected had some issue with their record-keeping.

All information that is created, sent and received in business is potentially a record. Management of these records is the process of looking after information through careful supervision and administration, whether they’re digital or paper records, they need to be managed to a high standard.

What is Record Management?

Records management activities include the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposal of records. These records could be in the form of contracts, memos, paper files, electronic files, reports, emails, videos, instant message logs or databases. Paper records may be stored in physical boxes on-premises or at a storage facility whilst digital records may be stored on storage media in-house or in the cloud. Whatever the format, and however they are stored, they need to be managed carefully.

The goal of records management is to help organisations keep the necessary documentation accessible for both business operations and compliance checks. This kind of conscientiousness saves a lot of time and a lot of stress in the event of something like an audit. In smaller businesses, spreadsheets may be used to track where records are stored and for how long, but larger organisations may need to install records management software suites. These can be linked to tax collection and a records retention schedule to help streamline processes.

Good records management will:

• Help you to do your job better by increasing the ease and efficiency of work; you can find the information you need quickly which allows you to get on with your work
• Increase your accountability, allowing you to provide evidence of previous events/transactions, offering up clear information that can be used if problems occur
• Increase company efficiency by making sure that you’re only keeping records you need
• Give you reliable records of high value if they’re ever needed as evidence due to their standards in validity, accuracy, and relevance
• Prove you’re are following legislation by complying to the expected standards

The consequences of poor records management are:

• Poor service delivery through a lack of efficiency
• Inaccurate and less confident decision making from employees because they’re having to work with below-standard/no records
• Little or non-compliance with legislation that can lead to penalties from HMRC
• Potential financial losses if an organisation is unable to defend its interests
• Wasted time and manpower from trying to find the records you need

Vital records, as the name suggests, refer to important events, specifically they are records of life events that are kept under governmental authority. This includes birth certificates, marriage licenses, and death certificates.

When it comes to records management the term ‘vital record’ means the records that are essential to the organisation in order to continue with its business both during and after a disaster, in other words, it would prevent the company from carrying on with day-to-day work if it wasn’t available.

Less than 5% of records are identified as vital and although losing most records will cause inconvenience, you can often work around it or recreate records. Vital records are the ones required in order to operate.

There are four areas that could count as a ‘disaster’: flood, fire, security, and environmental pollution. Vital records allow businesses to continue functioning even if the disaster destroys all other records.

Different Types of Vital Records

There are five categories of vital records:

1. Emergency: This is needed immediately after a disaster to help recovery such as staff contact details
2. Legal: They prove ownership or interests such as contracts and leases
3. Financial: Demonstrates the income and spending of a business, this could be a monthly report or bank details
4. Operational: They are required for critical services such as security procedures and IT configuration information
5. Organisation/Stakeholder right: This protects the interests of all parties, for example, annual accounts and shareholder registers could be included

Identifying a Vital Record

It is necessary to identify vital records to ensure that the records remain secure, accessible and easily locatable during a disaster. The vital records form a vital part of disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Companies need to protect the right records, rather than spending lots of resources on securely storing non-essential records whilst leaving vital records open to vulnerability.

To identify your vital records you should consider the following:

• Identify the key functions, business processes and stakeholders of your department
• Identify the potential impact of not providing these functions
• Identify the records needed to support these functions and processes
• Identify which of these records are vital – of the functions of these records can be re-established if they’re lost, then they’re not vital

How to Protect Vital Records: Electronic

• Electronic vital records must be stored on central servers so that they are protected by back-up and disaster recovery
• Don’t store vital records on portable hardware, such as USBs, DVDs/CDs
• Don’t store vital records on a laptop’s hard drive or on your personal hard drive
• Use a readable format such as PDF/PDFA or plain text or rich text format for records that need to be stored for a long period of time

How to Protect Vital Records: Hard Copies

Vital Records which are only available in paper format should be duplicated, in the same or original format depending on requirements, with the originals and copies stored in separate locations, if possible. There are two ways of doing this:

• Scan and save them electronically
• Use off-site storage

A record is anything that supports the business such as business decisions, policy documents and approval documents. This includes emails, paper documents or electronic files that provide evidence of a business’s activity.

Data and information can then be held as a record physically such as a book or electronically in a computer file, or even as a video. Most of the information you use in day-to-day working life will be classed as a record as a result.

Whilst records can deal with business activities such as policies and procedures, invoices, and meeting reports, the following are not generally classed as records:

• Personal communication
• Externally published information
• Blank forms or templates
• Personal emails
• Personal diary
• Draft of a policy

Different Types of Records:

Unrestricted records tend to cover information that is easily found on web pages. They are made available to the public, such as details of available services, contact information, organisational decisions, or environmental information.

Contextually sensitive records are normally available to the public, but sometimes circumstances prevent this. If the record is in draft form, it cannot be released until it is in its final format. If the information includes a third party, then this information cannot be made public without that person’s permission. In these examples, records may only be contextually sensitive for a short time, although this may vary.

Personal and Confidential Records are held about citizens, clients, customers, employees or any other individuals. This could include basic details such as names and addresses or go much more personal such as sexual orientations and political views.

Extremely Sensitive Records may be any type of information, meaning it doesn’t always have to be personal data. If these types of records were lost or made public, it would have a very negative effect on the reputation of the organisation as it could lead to consequences such as loss of life, damage to our ability to carry out our work, massive financial losses or the public’s safety being put at risk.

Why Record Management is Important

Management of records is the process of looking after information through careful supervision and administration, whether they’re digital or paper records, they need to be managed to a high standard.

The goal of records management is to help an organisation keep the necessary documentation accessible for both business operations and compliance checks, improving organisation which saves a lot of time, and a lot of stress.

The benefits of good records management are that it…

• Increases the ease and efficiency of work
• Increases your accountability by offering up clear information that can be used if problems occur
• Means that your records are of high value if they’re ever needed as evidence due to their standards in validity,accuracy, and relevance
• Shows you’re following legislation by complying to the expected standards