Best Practices for Record Storage (scanning & naming)

I hope you're not doing this without consulting your association attorney and master insurance carrier. Some documents do need to be maintained forever, as you've noted, while others can be disposed of after a a few years. Between consulting your attorney and insurance, you'll be able to establish a formal document retention policy. That policy could cover things like

* what homeowners are entitled to see upon request
* how requests are submitted and who processes the requests
* photocopying charges
*who will oversee document retention (possibly the secretary),
* how emails, text messages and faxes are addressed [depending on the issue, they can be considered association records]
*Audio visual recordings (e.g. security camera footage of common areas)
*Passwords for access to electronic records (e.g. recent records for the past four years might be kept in a special section of the community website that's only available to homeowners)
* Protecting personal information

And so on.

You don't say how large your association is, but you may want to consider consulting document retention companies in your area (get bids from at least 3) who may be able to do the work for you

I hope you're not doing this without consulting your association attorney and master insurance carrier. Some documents do need to be maintained forever, as you've noted, while others can be disposed of after a a few years. Between consulting your attorney and insurance, you'll be able to establish a formal document retention policy. That policy could cover things like

* what homeowners are entitled to see upon request
* how requests are submitted and who processes the requests
* photocopying charges
*who will oversee document retention (possibly the secretary),
* how emails, text messages and faxes are addressed [depending on the issue, they can be considered association records]
*Audio visual recordings (e.g. security camera footage of common areas)
*Passwords for access to electronic records (e.g. recent records for the past four years might be kept in a special section of the community website that's only available to homeowners)
* Protecting personal information

And so on.

You don't say how large your association is, but you may want to consider consulting document retention companies in your area (get bids from at least 3) who may be able to do the work for you

Every unit (I live in a townhouse community) has a set of records - CCR approvals, correspondence, and owner information. There's another huge set of documents divided by subject- for example, common area maintenance would be split out by year and then you'd have the contracts and related correspondence. Legal documents, like collection action, is kept at the attorney's office and in the unit file.

That's just for starters and I know there have been changes since I left the board 9 years ago. At one point, the records were kept with our property manager. One year they said they were out of room and were sending the older stuff (all paper) back to their clients to decide what happened to it. None legal and financial records were already secured, but the secretary and I began talking to our attorney about establishing a formal policy.

Meanwhile we tried to go through the boxes ourselves while they were in the office, bot soon realized it was too much for two people and suggested a date be set for all the board members to go through them so see what was there and what we needed to keep.

Unfortunately, our president took it upon herself to go through the boxes and toss what she felt wasn't necessary. We found out after the fact - no one was happy, of course, but it was too late to clean it up. I suspect some of those records were from ancient times when the community was self-managed and then it had three management companies before our current one.

At this point, we can only hope something doesn't return from the dead to bite us in the behind and that president has since passed away so we can't ask her.

There's no one way to do this - I like going by year, then subject, and then type of document. You'll also have to consider what you need to put your hands on relatively quickly. Perhaps you keep 7 years of documents on hand and older stuff is archived and stored elsewhere. You'll need to know what's where and back up all of it, which is why I suggested talking to a document retention company. You can still or the work yourself, if that's what you want, but getting help in organizing it is worth the consultation.

You can also start the conversation about a policy while reviewing and organizing what's there. Just don't toss anything until after you have a policy and several people participate in this project - someone might come up with a hood idea you didn't think of and several people can look at the document to endure it should ir shouldn't be saved and for how long.

PS - a periodic audit of the records might be useful. You don't need to do it every year, maybe every 2 to 5 years to ensure records were secured, stored or destroyed according to the policy and you know where everything is where it's supposed to be.

We did ours by Year.

We also separated by Officer:

Treasurer - Decade - Year
Budget
Bank Statements
Check book register
Lot Ledgers
Reserve Study

Secretary -
Governing documents (past and current)

Secretary - Decade - Year
Minutes - Board
Minutes - Membership
Minutes - Committees

Maintenance - Project
Signed Contracts
ROPs

We then kept paper copies of the existing governing documents and the last few years of minutes (with all attachments)