Until now, storage possibilities were considered to be paper, microfilm, tapes and optical disks. It is quite obvious that these kind of storage techniques are expensive, take up lots of space and will lead to time-consuming retrievals. Due to the development of technology, most of the employees don't have enough patience to accept long delays within the retrieval process. Through the creation of the internet, people can easily access information by clicking a button for instant prompt-retrieval on their desktops. The entire world is starting to get digitalized and the new EU directives for E-Business and E-trade are transformed into the different national legislations of the member states. Due to this chance nothing seems to stop the electronic storage and electronic archiving possibilities of business documents.

Or does it?

Reasons to keep hard copy retention schedules:

Paper storage is laid out by the law. The law requires it, or people want to prove their cases with written proof. The first reason refers to the legal requirements that are necessary which makes it impossible for an electronic original to do the same thing. For example, the signature on contracts with the statement " read and approved". These are examples from the labor law, insurance law and consumer law.

The second reason to keep a hard copy archive is mostly because it is required by the government. Most of these hard copy archives are related to social security documents, accounting documents, corporate law documents, VAT documents etc... It is clear that the government opts to use electronic storage for social documents. The first application that proved this governmental electronic elaboration is the Dimona declaration: This is a labor situation where every direct declaration is entered electronically by employers who are obliged by law to do so. Very important is that the government will centralize this information and will, at the end be the only unique source concerning this data. The government will store this information electronically which implies that companies no longer need to retain a hard copy staff register.

The situation is completely different for accounting and fiscal documents. Companies are not so pleased to hand over these kind of documents to a governmental institution and companies are confronted with a bunch of inconsistent legislations. VAT, Excise duties, accounting legislation, bankruptcy laws etc... It all results into a mixture of an electronic and a hard copy archive.

The 3rd reason not to abandon papery archives is because of its probative value. We don't want to go into the juridical description of the value as evidence in the civil law, corporate law and criminal law. We also don't want to explain the difference between a juridical fact or act, the legal requirements or the legitimacy of the evidence. There will be still some fixed content attached to an archival process because the legislation on e-archiving hasn't been laid out yet properly by the government.