Choosing A Paper Eating Monster

These days, a paper shredder is practically a necessity for every household. Considering that around 1 million people are victims of identity theft every year and that it can take 300 hours or more to resolve a case, a decent paper shredder is probably a wise investment. Here are a few tips to picking out a paper-eating monster that will fit your needs.

Keywords:

paper shredding, document shredding, document destruction

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These days, a home shedding machine is almost a necessity. With the constant barrage of credit card offers, bills, and bank statements that hit our mailbox everyday, it is no wonder that close to 1 million people are victims of identity theft each year.

Whether you live in a house or an apartment complex, there are usually several points where your trash could possibly be accessed and documents stolen.

The majority of apartment complexes don’t have secure trash chutes and it can in fact be very easy for dumpster divers to gather data about the apartment dwellers.

In some apartment complexes there are locked trash chutes which are great for the inhabitants because it limits access to the dumpsters to basically the maintenance map and in the trash collectors.

However, shredding sensitive data is not that hard, and might make your life easier in the long run.

Here are a few things to consider when choosing a home paper shredder.

Durability is important: You want a machine that is strong and will blast through lots of documents without jamming and without needing repair. Some document shredders are simply too weak, and will jam if you try to shred more than a few pieces of paper at a time.

Cutting method: There are several types of cuts available, ranging from plain old strip cuts (the least secure, but often adequate), to confetti cuts which cut the paper into much finer strips and also cross cut, which cuts the paper in more than one direction.

For most home documents, a plain old strip cutter may be all that is needed. The idea is to prevent a dumpster diver from getting a hold of your financial information, and I'd venture to guess that few to none would be patient enough to reconstruct a strip-shredded document.

You can find a reasonably priced home paper shredder on eBay, at Office Depot, or in one of many online web stores.

Here are a few features and characteristics of the document shredder to consider before buying:

Clearing Paper Jams: How easy is it too clear minor paper jams? It's a little like putting your hand in the garbage disposal so you want to be sure that it is reasonably easy to get the machine running again because paper jams are inevitable.

Safety features: You wouldn't want a curious infant sticking his fingers in the metal teeth of the paper eating monster. Are there safety features on the home paper shredder if you have infants or small children around?

You may also find yourself wanting to shred items with staples and paper clips, CDs, credit cards, ID cards, and floppy disks...Some home systems are strong enough to handle these materials in small volumes and might be worth checking into because these are items tend to accumulate around your home office.

Lastly, remember that some security is better than none: If you are on a tight budget there is one last solution: A pair of sharp scissors.

Visit our website for more resources about paper shredding.

Document Security – Not Just Paper Shredding

What is document security? Why is document security important to me? What are the best methods my company can use to enhance document security? Is it expensive to do? These are some of the questions you may have about document security.

In this article, I will explain more about document security and why it is important that your business implement some sort of policy or plan to improve the way your employees and you handle documents.

Almost every business has documents...

Keywords:

document security, paper shredding, document destruction, shredit, shred-it, identity theft

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What is document security? Why is document security important to me? What are the best methods my company can use to enhance document security? Is it expensive to do? These are some of the questions you may have about document security.

In this article, I will explain more about document security and why it is important that your business implement some sort of policy or plan to improve the way your employees and you handle documents.

Almost every business has documents that they have to process on a daily basis. Contracts, Invoices, Receipts, Purchase Orders, In-house Memos, and documents related to sensitive information are some of the examples of documents you may use.

Document security includes how those documents are stored, backed up, processed, delivered, and disposed of. First we will talk about storage and backup of your documents. This involves a lot more than just which type of filing cabinet you want to buy.

Even in this electronic age, paper documents are a necessity. The storage of these documents safely and securely is often ignored. For sensitive documents, you do need locked file cabinets. You need to be aware of who in your company will have keys to those file cabinets and they need to be stored in a secure location. Fireproof filing cabinets are also a good idea.

This might seem to be inconvenient, expensive, and time-consuming, but the loss of your documents is going to cost you a lot more time and money than having security in place for them.

Transferring all of your documents into electronic format is essential to document security. Either through data entry or through scanning of documents you can back them up in electronic format to help ensure their safety and recovery if you lose all the paper.

Many of your documents today are already in electronic format. Those and the electronic backups of the paper documents you make also need to be backed up besides just on your computer. There are electronic data storage services you can use online that will give you storage space on secure servers.

Some of these can be relatively inexpensive, others charge too much. I suggest you research several of them to find the solution that is right for you. You can burn those documents to CD, but then must find a secure way, off of your business premises to store those CDs.

You can store the data on other computers you have at home or elsewhere, but need to keep in mind who might be able to access them. The companies that provide secure storage for electronic documents and data are usually a much more secure method.

You need to implement a specific security policy in regards to every type of document your company uses. Your employees need to follow these specific document security guidelines at all times.

Document and data delivery is also an important consideration. Do you use encrypted email when sending and receiving documents? Do you require a receipt from the receiver of your emails to show they have gotten the data you sent them? These are easy to implement. PGP for email is one of the best methods. Do a search for PGP and you will find more information about it.

When you mail sensitive documents, do you use registered mail? Do you insure it? These are important pieces to your document security policy. Your employees should know which specific types of outgoing mail are to receive special attention.

Who opens the mail your company receives? Is it ever left out in the open where just anyone can pick it up? Your employees should be aware that document security extends to incoming mail as well. There needs to be specific instructions as to what happens to all incoming mail.

Now we can move on to document disposal. Do you have an office shredder? You may want to have one in each employee’s work area who might be handling or creating sensitive company documents. Have a policy of shredding the documents they throw away. Better to be safe than sorry. Thieves and others will go through your trash to find any information they can use to their advantage.

If you have a lot of sensitive documents or wish to be more careful, there are services that come to your office to shred and destroy documents then remove them to be incinerated. These companies guarantee the safe disposal of your documents.

I hope this article has helped answer any questions you may have had about document security. I further hope that it has made you aware of the need for you to have a document security policy at your business.

Contracts For Your Customers, Ink It On Paper

When you're dealing with customers, sometimes things can go wrong. It might be your fault, it might be their fault or it might be no-one's fault -- but if you didn't make a contract, then you'll all suffer.

Why Do I Need Contracts?

A contract gives you a sound legal base for your business, and some guarantee that you're going to get paid for your work without you having to ask the customer for payment in advance. In the event of a dispute, the contract lays down what th...

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When you're dealing with customers, sometimes things can go wrong. It might be your fault, it might be their fault or it might be no-one's fault -- but if you didn't make a contract, then you'll all suffer.

Why Do I Need Contracts?

A contract gives you a sound legal base for your business, and some guarantee that you're going to get paid for your work without you having to ask the customer for payment in advance. In the event of a dispute, the contract lays down what the agreement was so that you can point to it and say what was agreed. If you ever end up having to go to court (let's hope you won't), the contract is what the judge's decision will be based on.

Without a contract, you leave yourself vulnerable and open to exploitation. Someone could claim that the terms they agreed with you were different to what you say they were, or that they never signed up for anything at all and so they won't pay. It's especially common to see big businesses mistreat small ones, thinking that they won't have the knowledge or the money to do anything about it. Essentially, contracts take away your customers' ability to hold non-payment over your head, and give you the ability to hold it over theirs instead.

Written and Verbal Contracts.

It is important to point out the distinction in the law between a verbal (spoken) contract and a proper, written one. A verbal contract is binding in theory, but in practice can be very hard to prove. A written contract, on the other hand, is rock-solid proof of what you're saying.

You might think that you're never going to get into a dispute with your customers, but it's all too common to find yourself in a little disagreement. They will often want to get you to do some 'small' amount of extra work to finish the job or make it better, not realising that doing so would completely obliterate your profit margin.

For this reason, you should be very wary of doing anything with nothing but a verbal contract. On the other hand, if you were incautious or too trusting and only got a verbal contract, it could still go some way towards helping you, especially if there were witnesses.

Won't It Be Expensive?

Written contracts don't necessarily need to be formal contracts, which are drawn up by a lawyer with 'contract' written at the top and signed by both parties. These kinds of contracts are the most effective, but can be expensive to have produced, not to mention intimidating to customers.

The most common kind of written contract, oddly enough, is a simple letter. If you send a customer a letter (or, indeed, an email) laying out your agreement before you start work, and they write back to agree to it, that is enough to qualify as a written contract, with most of the protections it affords.

If you are doing high-value work for some clients, though, it could be worth the time and trouble of having your lawyer write a formal contract, or at least of doing it yourself and getting a lawyer to look it over. Formal contracts will give you more protection if the worst happens, and there's nothing to stop you from making it a one-off expense only by re-using the same contract for multiple customers.

Contracts for Small Purchases: the Terms and Conditions.

Obviously it would be silly to expect everyone who buys some $10 thing from you to sign a contract, or write back indicating their agreement to your terms. In this situation, you should have a statement of the 'terms and conditions' that your customer is agreeing to by buying from you, and they should have to tick some kind of box indicating their agreement before you send anything.

Luckily, it isn't usually so necessary to be paranoid about contract law with small purchases anyway, since customers will be paying you first and receiving the goods or services afterwards, not the other way around. If you plan to offer any kind of payment plan or other long-term agreement, of course, this should always be backed up with a signed contract.

Business Directory Moves From Paper to Computer Screen

A business directory helps buyers to find businesses that sell what they want. The directories used to come printed, often on yellow pages. A buyer went to the relevant category, looked through the listings, and phoned promising suppliers.

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Businessmagnet Directory Ltd , Business To Business Directory

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A business directory helps buyers to find businesses that sell what they want. The directories used to come printed, often on yellow pages. A buyer went to the relevant category, looked through the listings, and phoned promising suppliers.

These days, the directories are more likely to come in an online form. Online business directories have several advantages. Businesses can keep their information up to date so that a prospective buyer won't find a wrong person at the other end of the phone, for example.

Business directories not only serve consumers but also businesses. They can get their businesses listed in the directories and attract the attention of buyers who browse the directories. Much business can come in this way, particularly if the directories are online directories.

Advantages of Online Business Directories

Online business directories have several advantages compared to paper-based print directories. These include:

DIRECTORY USERS:

• Users can find what they want much more easily and quickly using search and other facilities. Instead of thumbing through pages of an unwieldy volume, they just click the mouse a few times.






• Much more information can be accommodated in the online directories. This includes not only information about the listed businesses but also other relevant and helpful information. Direction maps and informative topical notes are examples of such add-ons.






• Information in online directories are likely to be more up to date, as listed businesses can edit their details.






• Users can quickly click through to the business website and get more details. They can also contact the businesses if the details meet their expectations, or look promising.

LISTED BUSINESSES:

• In addition to providing more information about themselves in the directories, businesses can provide full details at their websites to which directory users typically click through. This is much better than conveying information over the phone when a print directory user phones in.






• Users are much more likely to check out websites anonymously than phone in. This means that more users are likely to become aware of your offers.






• A listing in an online directory has the incidental advantage of providing in-pointing links to the websites of listed businesses. Many businesses list their businesses in many directories to gain link popularity that boosts the search engine visibility of their web sites.

Organizing Business Directories

Making it easy to find information in different ways is one of the prime objectives while deciding on how to arrange the content, layout and navigation of the business directory.

A search facility with advanced features is a standard feature now. You can typically search by business name, category, location or product. The use of clearly visible tabs to direct visitor to major sections, and links in each section to sub-sections, etc are also standard.

The look and feel of a directory can determine whether it would become popular, provided it has an adequate number of listings to become known as a good resource.

Many directories seek a niche approach, focusing on a particular business category, such as agriculture or plastics.

Conclusion

A business directory helps both buyers and sellers. Online business directories offer several advantages over print directories, which tend to become unwieldy and even obsolete quickly.

Online business directories offer speedier finding and more information. For listed businesses, they also provide some link popularity.

To be successful, a business directory has to attract both businesses and directory users. They try to do this using different techniques and approaches.

Employee Benefits Driving Corporate Performance -- A White Paper

Strategies to improve employee morale and productivity with unsubsidized employee benefits.

Keywords:

management,employee benefits,human resources,employee discounts,intranet,corporate perks,employee

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In today’s economy, companies of all sizes are facing a number of challenges that require urgent action. Health care costs are rising, pension obligations are growing and top talent is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit in the rebounding job market. Among the most significant business trends, competitive pressure on American workers is increasing at a rapid pace as offshore business process outsourcing (BPO) becomes more effective in performing traditional American jobs at much lower costs. The fundamental challenge for human resources managers is to re-invent employee benefit programs to deliver higher performance at a lower cost.

The process of re-inventing employee benefit programs begins by developing a portfolio of employee benefits that maximizes total economic value for employees, while minimizing employer investment. In other words, there are a number of very attractive and financially rewarding benefits that employers could provide their employees. One of the most effective, yet highly underutilized, benefits is the employee discount program.

Few employers offer their employees an employee discount program, even though it’s economic value to employees is very significant, while it’s cost is very low. These programs are either developed and maintained by internal human resources staff, or outsourced to managed employee discount programs (such as www.EmployeeHelper.com). Based on case studies conducted by EmployeeHelper.com, companies that have deployed managed employee discount programs with a wide variety of negotiated discounts, the net effect for employees can be equal to a compensation increase of over 5%.

Considering the fact that employee discount programs are basically free for employees and their employees, the use of this program is expected to grow significantly across the marketplace. In an economy where competitive advantage is becoming increasingly tied to human capital, enhancements to employee benefits represent a growth opportunity for all business.

Please visit http://www.employeehelper.com for more information about employee discount programs.