by Leo Wiles
26 October 2016
I feel like I’m drowning in stuff since starting to freelance five years ago. Please, help. How long do you keep everything – like story notes, transcripts, mp3s of interviews, correspondence with editors and so on? My office is a tip. Jan
Hi Jan. In today’s paperless office I find it’s pretty rare to be surrounded by mountains of cascading papers. That’s a situation I haven’t been in since buying a scanner to archive all receipts and working with floppy discs all those years ago. (Someone else I know who likes to ahem, print lots of things out, may feel differently…)
But now with the advent of digital files and 4 terabyte hard drives I’ve become a complete hoarder, which is an easy process given how small word documents are. I use Time Machine to back up my MacBook Pro files – ideally weekly, but more realistically monthly – leaving the big clear out to the end of the year. In that downtime around December / January, I transfer the years work to an external hard drive that lives in my drawer. I also have a private cloud mirror system in case the hard drive falls over – which means that I have 18 years of records, all up of finished articles, interviews, transcripts etc. filed.
When it comes to correspondence, I am loathe to hit delete. My Hotmail account with its directory of folders for all aspects of my private and public life and that of my children means that I have missives from 1991! I do however have a clear out when Microsoft warns me that I’m hitting my storage limits. That’s when I carefully delete folders that may contain work correspondence from a title that’s closed or one where I know my writing won’t come back to bite me.
As for MP3 and MP4 files from interviews, they to go onto the hard drives too (although I admit I did leave 12 years’ worth of taped interviews on mini tapes with a showbiz writer pal of mine when I left Blighty. Figuring that they were so well labelled that he could use them as a unique resource for the celebrities I had chatted to, as they were of no interest to the Australasian marketplace).
Since returning to Australia 14 years ago, I’ve pretty much recycled all my other small tapes UNLESS I felt there was a contentious interview on-board.
Which leads us to the legalities. Please note I am not, nor have I ever been, a legal eagle, leading me to trawl Google Law Society pages and the MEAA media room to answer that part of your question. And I’m still at a loss to find a definitive guide to your legal obligations for retaining records. It’s worth bearing in mind though that each State has its own Statute of Limitations regarding someone suing you, but on the whole, breach of contract runs out after six years (according to the Parliament of Australia website).
For personal injury, which I am assuming is in relation to a potential interviewee or someone impacted by your writing, the norm seems to be between 3-6 years. Unless the person was a child at the time, in which case the start time of the statute begins when they turn 18!
As you’d expect, the ATO is very clear when it comes to sole traders – you’re obliged to keep income and invoice paperwork and receipts for five years. I upgraded from a shoebox filing system 14 years ago and now use an excel spread-sheet system for invoices, and a lovely easy-to-use KIKI K receipt folder – whereby you seal the envelopes for each receipt grouping IE transport and utilities. Receipts then live in an IKEA plastic zip lock bag at the bottom of a cupboard in my study till it’s time to joyfully shred it.
List members: do you do things differently when keeping work-related stuff? And can you shed some light on the legal side of record keeping that I may have missed?
