6/13/2012
I know the IRS tells us to keep our tax information for up to seven years. I do this religiously, because I fear if I throw the information out too soon, I’ll be sure to be audited. How long, though, should we keep our client’s Insertion Orders/Time Orders/Media Plans? I have literally hundreds of boxes containing client business for clients we don’t work with anymore, and many boxes for clients we still work with, but have records from ten years ago. When, exactly, is it that I can feel comfortable throwing this stuff out. I’d really like to save some trees. I’m willing to donate all this paper. I’ve already cleaned out the computers. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t have any memory left. I felt it was okay to delete the information from the computers, because I still had hard copies of everything. I think I am going to go out on a limb, and discard everything older than seven years ago. If it works for the IRS, it works for me!