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I don't see that this is much of a problem for me. Once a customers job has been completed, collected and paid for, then I don't need to keep their information at all. The information that I have will be on a job card, when they collect and pay for their job, give them the job card with their job and they have the satisfaction of being told that was the only information I had of theirs. Job done.
Until they come, my reason for keeping the information is that I need it to do the job and to know how to contact them when the job is ready for collection. I don't do direct marketing and to be honest, I don't like being bombarded with unwanted junk mail, emails, or anything else of the same ilk. I grew up in an era when we never had any of this and liked how it was.
Mark Lacey
“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer
I operate as a normal retail shop, every transaction is recorded, but unless I am making a sale to a business, or a customer who asks for a receipt, they will get a copy of the order showing the price paid and marked paid. I do have a duplicate book for hand written receipts, which is all legal and above board. There are still the no carbon required copies still in the book if anyone what to see them. My accountant says this is all I need to do.
Every single transaction in entered and appears in the section for that day. Cash totals for start of day, end of day, monies in, monies out and calculations to reconcile entries with cash totals are all recorded, there are boxes to do this in the book. Small retail businesses are permitted to operate like this, but you must comply with HMRC's requirements for keeping proper accounts.
Every transaction is separately recorded and identifable. My monthly balance sheets use double entry bookkeeping and all expenses are classified in the balance sheets analysis section. The balance sheet has check sum and error checking built in, it's all done properly and nothing is left to chance. Our accountant used to work for the inland revenue and is very fussy that everything is legally and morally correct.
I don't let anyone take anything away without paying for it, so no take away an invoice and pay me when you feel like it. Framing jobs are not released without being paid for - Period!
Mark Lacey
“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer
I must admit I keep all details of every customer and job for ever. The invoices are disposed of after 6 years but details of every job and how it was framed and with what go back to 2008. The only personal details of the customer kept after 6 years is his/her phone number. Well, I have loads of phone numbers in my mobile that go back 15 years so that cant be an issue.
I couldn't count the number of times a customer has come back and said "you remember that job I had done a few years ago? Well I want to match it"
I would guess that there may be other ways of dealing with this, but I'm not interested in registering with who ever I need to so that I can store customer data, so my way round this is to print a label as part of my job card and this is cut out and stuck onto the backing board of their frame, so they can tell me. I'd be surprised if they wanted me to match another frame that they no longer had, so I think this should work.
I have been thinking about how information like this could be stored as anonymous data not containing any personal references to the customers name, or other personal information. I would say that there are ways of doing this, but you would have to have some way of identifying the right information without requiring anything that may be considered not acceptable within the current legal framework. Not easy I reckon.
Mark Lacey
“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer