Filing is done by the various functional departments of an organization according to their requirements. Every department has to install separate filing equipments and appoint specialized staffs to look after the filing work. This system is known as decentralized filing or departmental filing .
Decentralized filing offers advantages over centralized filing. They are briefly discussed below.
1. It ensures efficient operation of functional departmental activities since the documents needed by a department are readily available in the department itself. Reference becomes easy and quick.
2. Specialized knowledge about the department prevents misfiling. The safety of the papers is also ensured.
3. There is no difficulty in maintaining the secrecy or confidential nature of documents.
4. Filing work is an additional work to the existing departmental staff. Therefore, it reduces the cost incurred on the employment of staff.
5. It is a suitable and viable method if the functional departments of an organization are located in different geographical areas.
6. Greater efficiency of functional operation is ensured since filing is on a comparatively smaller scale.
Decentralized filing suffers from the following drawbacks.
1. There is a duplication of efforts, space and equipment which are responsible for the increased cost of filing operations.
2. If specialized staffs are employed, it would not be fully utilized but it leads to high cost of staff utilization and under utilization of human resources.
3. Standardization of filing work is not possible when each department has it’s our system and method of filing.
4. There is a lack of uniformity in the filing maintenance.
5. The co-ordination of records becomes difficult because of their decentralized location.
6. The same type of documents is maintained in more than one department. It creates confusion among the staff and cause interruptions in filing work.
7. There is no clear supervision on the decentralized filing system.