Five real questions from hotel, school, university and office furniture buyers, answered on this date and archived here once the next day's set went live.
Under the Companies Act, books of account generally need to be preserved for at least 8 financial years, which means record-storage capacity has to be planned as an accumulating 8-year rolling archive, not just current-year filing. Budget storage furniture for steady year-on-year growth in archived volume, not a fixed one-time capacity, and confirm the exact retention period with your own company secretary or auditor for your specific document types.
Yes — GST records (invoices, credit/debit notes, e-way bills, input tax credit records) generally have their own retention requirement, commonly cited around 6 years from the relevant filing date, which is shorter than the Companies Act's 8-year books-of-account period. Running two different retention clocks for different document types means a filing system benefits from clearly labelled, date-stamped archive boxes rather than one undifferentiated backlog.
Yes — property documents and certain court orders or judgments are generally meant to be retained permanently rather than for a fixed number of years, so mixing them into the same rolling archive as 6-8-year documents risks them being accidentally cleared out during a routine purge. Keep permanent records in a clearly separate, dedicated section or cabinet rather than relying on staff to remember which boxes are exempt from the general retention schedule.
Secure, certified destruction — shredding or a documented pulping/disposal service — is the standard practice for expired records containing financial, personal or confidential business information, rather than simply discarding them with general waste. Keep a destruction log recording what was destroyed and when, since being able to show a retention policy was actually followed can matter as much as having the policy itself.
Start from actual annual document volume — boxes or linear shelf-metres generated per year — multiplied by the applicable retention period, rather than guessing a round number; an 8-year retention requirement on steadily growing annual volume needs meaningfully more capacity in year 8 than year 1. Build in headroom for business growth and review the estimate periodically rather than treating it as a one-time calculation done at move-in.