Document & Archive Storage
Document and archive storage for Indian businesses — contracts, financial records and HR files held securely off-site, indexed for retrieval, and retained as long as your compliance policy requires.
Every Indian business accumulates records it is legally or operationally required to keep but has no everyday use for: eight years of books of account, completed contracts, HR files for former employees, tax records, project archives. Storing them in office space is expensive in rent and inconvenient in practice. Storing them insecurely risks both the records and the compliance obligation. Seemleius document and archive storage gives those records a secure, indexed home off-site, with retrieval when a specific file is actually needed.
It is a specialist option within our storage and warehousing service, run from our own monitored facility.
Indian compliance and retention requirements
Indian businesses face specific retention requirements under the Companies Act, Income Tax Act, GST regulations and sector-specific rules. Financial records, board minutes, statutory registers, and HR files each carry their own minimum retention period. Off-site archive storage lets businesses meet those obligations without dedicating premium office floor space to boxes that are rarely opened.
Secure facility
Records held in our access-controlled, monitored building — not a general storage unit with unrestricted access.
Indexed intake
Boxes catalogued and indexed when they enter the facility, so a specific file or box can actually be found and retrieved.
On-demand retrieval
Request a specific box or file and we schedule its retrieval and delivery to your office.
Retention-aligned terms
Storage terms that match your actual retention schedule — whether that is two years or ten.
How document and archive storage works
- Scope the archive. Roughly how many boxes, what categories of records, and how often you expect to retrieve files — this shapes how we index and structure the intake.
- Collect and index. We collect the boxes from your office and catalogue them on intake. You receive a reference index so you know what is held and can make specific retrieval requests.
- Stored securely. Records are held in our monitored facility, accessible only to authorised personnel, with your index maintained throughout.
- Retrieve on request. When a specific file or box is needed, request it and we schedule retrieval and delivery to your office.
Archive storage during an office relocation
One of the most common entry points for document storage is an office relocation. When a business is moving premises, records that have no place in the new space — but cannot be destroyed — are often the item that causes the most friction. We fold document storage into the office relocation plan, collecting and indexing records as part of the move so they arrive organised in storage rather than as a problem to solve later.
Whether it is a one-off archive clear-out or an ongoing retention arrangement for a growing business, we scope it to your requirements. Ask us about archive storage and we will set it up properly.
Paper does not survive India by accident
A box of records left in a spare room or a basement godown faces a specific set of threats in this climate, and every office that has opened a ten-year-old carton knows them. Silverfish eat the starch in paper and bindings. Termites eat the paper itself, and the shelf under it. Monsoon humidity feeds mould that turns a file’s edges furry and its ink illegible. Dust works into everything, and heat makes cheap thermal paper — the kind many receipts and older fax records are printed on — fade to blank. The loss is silent: nobody notices until the specific file is needed, which is exactly the moment a record has legal weight.
An archive facility is run against those threats deliberately. Cartons sit on racking, never on the floor where damp travels first. The building is sealed and ventilated so the interior does not track the monsoon outside. The pest programme is scheduled and documented, with the treatments chosen for a paper environment. And intake includes a condition check — a carton arriving damp or already infested is dealt with before it can be racked next to a thousand clean ones.
The clientele for this service is broader than people expect. Chartered accountancy and audit firms deposit working-paper files by the year. Law practices archive matter files they are professionally obliged to keep. Clinics and hospitals hold patient records under their own retention norms. Manufacturers keep quality and batch records that outlive the products, and NBFCs and brokers hold agreement files whose regulators expect them to be producible on demand. Different rules, identical physical problem — paper that must survive, indexed well enough to be found.
Retention periods that matter to Indian businesses
Most archive volume exists because a rule says it must. The periods below are the ones that generate the majority of the cartons we hold — use them as a planning reference, and confirm the current position with your company secretary or auditor, because retention rules do change:
| Records | Typical retention requirement |
|---|---|
| Books of account under the Companies Act | Eight financial years, held in good order |
| Income-tax records and supporting documents | Six years from the end of the relevant assessment year — longer where proceedings are open |
| GST records and returns | Seventy-two months from the due date of the annual return |
| Payroll, PF and ESI records | Multi-year periods under the respective rules — commonly the longest-lived HR paper |
| Statutory registers and board minutes | Effectively permanent for many registers |
Notice what the table implies: a company’s archive is not one block with one end date. It is layers, each expiring on its own schedule. That is why the index matters more than the racking — a well-indexed archive lets you retire cartons the year their obligation lapses, instead of paying to store everything until someone finally orders a clear-out of boxes nobody can identify.
Priced by the carton, not the square foot
Archive storage is quoted on the number of standard cartons, the expected retrieval pattern, and the indexing depth you choose. Box-level indexing records what each carton is — department, year, category — and suits archives that are kept to satisfy an obligation and rarely opened. File-level indexing lists the contents of each carton and costs more at intake, but it is what makes a single-file retrieval possible without pulling and searching a whole box. Most businesses mix the two: file-level for the records that get asked for, box-level for the rest.
Retrievals are priced per event, which keeps the holding cost low for archives that sleep. A retrieval is physical: the carton or file is pulled against the index, delivered to your office, and checked back in when it returns — with the log showing the round trip. Insurance on an archive is written against declared reconstitution value rather than paper value; for records whose loss would mean regulatory exposure rather than replacement cost, say so at scoping, because it changes how the declaration should be framed.
When a retention layer lapses, the cartons are returned to you for destruction under your own controls — most companies run witnessed shredding through their stationery or compliance vendor — and the index is updated so the archive record shows the boxes as retired, not merely missing.
Getting an existing archive under control
The clean version of archive storage — neatly labelled cartons arriving on a schedule after each year-end — is the minority case. The common case is the backlog: a storeroom, a mezzanine or a rented godown holding years of accumulated boxes, some labelled, many not, packed by people who left the company long ago. Office moves surface these rooms; so do audits, floods and new compliance officers.
A backlog project runs differently from a routine deposit. It starts with a walkthrough to size the problem in cartons and identify what condition they are in — damp-damaged boxes are photographed and flagged before anything moves. Intake then does the sorting the storeroom never had: contents are identified to at least box level, records are grouped by department and year rather than by which shelf they happened to share, and obviously expired material is set aside in a list for your decision rather than silently stored at your expense. The archive that comes out the other side is smaller, indexed and defensible — usually the first time anyone in the company could say with confidence what records it actually holds.
Collection itself follows a fixed routine, because chain of custody is the whole point with records. The crew brings uniform archive cartons and labels; boxes are sealed and numbered at your office, in front of your nominated officer, and the index begins at your door rather than at the warehouse. A despatch manifest listing every carton number is signed by both sides before the vehicle leaves. At intake the count is reconciled against that manifest, condition is noted carton by carton, and the reconciled index is sent back to the officer who signed the manifest. If a number is missing at either end, it is found that day — not discovered three years later by an assessing officer asking for a file.
If the trigger is an office relocation, the backlog work folds into the move plan, which is by far the cheapest moment to do it: the boxes are being handled anyway, and every carton culled is a carton that neither moves nor stores.
The index is the product
What you are really buying from an archive service is the ability to answer a question quickly: where is the 2019 vendor agreement, which box holds the March payroll registers, can we produce this by Thursday. The racking keeps records safe; the index is what makes them usable. Ours records each carton’s reference, department, record category, date range and location, plus the file list where file-level indexing was chosen — and you hold a copy in a format your team can search, so requesting a retrieval never depends on ringing someone who “knows the archive”.
The index also pays for itself at the exits. Retention reviews run off it — filter the cartons whose period lapses this year, and the retirement decision takes an afternoon instead of a rummage. Auditors accept a well-kept index as the map of the archive, which shortens the annual conversation considerably. And if the company is ever acquired or restructured, the index is what turns “years of boxes somewhere” into a due-diligence answer.
Answers for finance teams and compliance officers
Who can request a retrieval?
Only the people you authorise, named in writing at setup. Every retrieval is logged — who asked, what was pulled, when it went back. For records with confidentiality weight, an access list of two or three named officers is normal, and we hold to it even when the request comes from someone senior who is not on it.
How quickly can a specific file reach our office?
Ask on a Monday morning and a routine pull is on your desk within a couple of working days anywhere in the same city. Where a hearing date or an audit deadline sits behind the request, say so — the pull is then sequenced against the date rather than the queue.
Is there a minimum archive size?
No. Twenty cartons of founding paperwork from a startup are as workable as four hundred boxes after an office move. With a small deposit, collection and indexing simply form a larger share of the first invoice than the racking does, and the quote shows that split plainly.
Do we need to index the boxes ourselves before collection?
No, though it helps if someone who knows the records is available on collection day. Indexing to box level is done at intake as standard; file-level indexing is done where you have chosen it. What we do need from you is the retention category for each group of records — which rule it is being kept under — because that is what drives the review date on the index.
Can we add cartons over time?
Yes — most archives grow annually, typically after each financial-year close. New cartons are indexed on the same structure as the existing deposit, so the archive stays one coherent, searchable record rather than a series of disconnected drops.
Can an archive transfer from another storage provider?
Routinely. We collect from the existing facility, check the cartons against whatever listing exists, and re-index on intake — which is often the moment a company discovers what its old listing missed. The transfer is also the natural point to run a retention review, so expired material exits rather than paying to change address.
What should records be packed in?
Uniform archive cartons — sturdy, stackable and sized so a full box is still liftable. Mixed odd-size boxes waste racking, stack badly and hide damage. If your records are currently in supermarket cartons and old printer boxes, say so; repacking into standard cartons at intake is normal on first deposits and pays for itself in space and safety.