Field technicians may refer to the file before going out on a service call to glean information about the system to be repaired or modified. Accounting staff use the file to determine payment histories. Maintenance of the file is largely the responsibility of the reception staff who cull inactive records on an ongoing basis. Disposition procedures are implemented for customer files inactive for three years. All materials are discarded from inactive files with the exception of contracts.
Legal considerations dictate the semi-permanent retention of all contracts in remote storage.
The labor intensive, manual procedures required for document disposition occupy an inordinate amount of staff time. As a result, the reception staff is not able to focus sufficient time and energy on other mission specific tasks. Customer File Organization and Contents Customer files are arranged alphabetically by client name. If material is added for a client in the miscellaneous file, a full customer file is established. Customer files that have been inactive for three years are manually purged from the system and only the initial contract is retained in remote storage.