Backup Your Employee Files

There is nothing worse than being told by your boss, manager, executive etc. That your information has been lost, and we don’t believe your (hours, expense reports, etc).  For those of you that work in the office environment you have a few options to avoid any complications for a he said she said issue by looking out for yourself.

Simple things like time off requests are often required to be approved by your manager in many companies large and small alike, you should keep these around a while as it is your receipt that you were approved to be off of work.  You don’t need any issues if some crazy Facebook pictures of you on a beach show up and make the office envious, because someone forgot you were on a legitimate vacation.  Without a doubt you certainly do not need to get reamed out, lectured, or fired for being a no call no show, because everyone simply “forgot” you were taking the afternoon, day, week off from work.

For those of you who are blessed to work with modern copy equipment and are feeling green, you can most likely bring with you a personal USB storage device that you can plug into your copier, and scan your signed time off request sheets, and other sensitive work contracts.  This is also very handy for copying your approved expense reports, medical insurance information, nondisclosure forms, or any other legal or contractual agreement that you may enter during your time of work.

Personally there is no such thing as being too safe so in the past I would typically make a copy of my signed forms for myself, and make a scan just in case I lost my paper or suffered a fire.

For those of you who don’t have the luxury of such equipment or work mostly outside it is a good idea to keep a log or journal of your hours and employee records.

You might have the utmost respect for your employer or boss, and that is fine and dandy but life happens and their computer can get lost, stolen, hard disks crash, and the burden of proof is typically on you to prove you were in the right.