Letting Agent Record Keeping

[Louis252]

I work from home Property Managment & I am running out of storage space for my files/paperwork.

I currently scann AST's, Inventorys etc once signed by a new tenant and file away originals.

I have been told what I should be doing (to save storage space) is only keep the originals docs until the tenant vacates. Once vacated and I know there is no dispute I can shred the originals, obviously keeping my scanned docs to refere to at a later date.

This way if I do need to evict a tenant I have an original doc to use. Once they are gone I stil have "copies" to refere back to if needed.

Any thoughts on this? Or should I be doing what I am doing now and holding the originals for 6 years?

Thanks!

[beresfordresidential]

Hi Louis252,

We are an entirely paperless office and keeping scanned copies is fine in terms of industry and accounting compliance (our account and ARLA have comfirmed this).

Keeping originals for the duration of the tenancy isn't a bad idea but as originals can be altered/forged as easily as electronic copies I wouldn't say that it is essential to do this.

[ram]

Don't forget to back up all your data.

Install another hard drive to copy records over to.

I had a new computer, new hard drive, plus 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drives, and tansfered all old data from outgoing disk to this new disk, and after only 13 months, the hard drive would have to be "kick started" to access, so I quicky transfered all data to new one, kicking the old hard drive ( well, tapping it ) to continue to read data.

Managed it eventually.

Moral of story, Even hard drives can become faulty with it's thousands of soldered connections on circuit board underneath, so back up your data. I didn't, but I managed to before complete failure of hard disk.

R.a.M.

[CountrywideRL]

Back up your back ups and keep them seperate. A workmate had recent joy of spending £1000 of rebuiling a laptop hardrive when both the origional laptop and his back became damadged.

I think you can even store an additional back up 100MB online for free nowdays.