You have probably heard all kinds of reasons why you should keep your old records: because of the risk of an IRS audit is probably the most commonly given reason. I’ve heard that the IRS can request up to six or seven years’ worth of financial records (I can’t remember which it is), but that you should also plan on keeping certain records — such as bank records or business expense records — indefinitely.

However, another good reason why to keep your old records is for the customer information. Let’s see you get a new system set up that manages all of your customer’s names and emails, so that you can send out newsletters or special offers via email. Keeping all of these records means that you can see if your old customers would be interested in joining the mailing list.

No one knows the “old customers make new leads” approach better than the car dealership industry. I have it on good authority from friends who used to work as car salesmen that if they didn’t have any sales going at the time, they had to call up old customers and try to sell them on the idea of coming down to the dealership to purchase a new car.

Even if you’re sold on the idea of old customer records having value as leads, though, what do you do with all of these records? Well, first of all you’ll need to input all of the information into a database to make it easy to access — name, email address, snail mail address, phone number, and other details such as purchase dates and trends can all be useful information to keep handy.

But even once you’ve harvested the information you need, don’t assume you can throw the records away. If you are lacking in space, store the records at a secure self storage facility. Business storage can be found for reasonable prices, and enables you to keep things like paperwork and data backups without having to spring for a larger office.

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