When you are running a business, you are going to be dealing with papers that contain important information and details. You do not want all your business papers to be spread across the office. This can result in things get lost and it can be hard to find what you are looking for if you are disorganised.
Here are a few tips to help keep your business documents organised:
Get everything you need
The items you will need to get organised are:
- Filing cabinet
- Shredder
- Label maker
- A safe for private documents
- File folders
This list can change as what you require can be different from others based on the type of business you have, the business goals and the existing system. The point of a filing system is to help you be organised and prepared for the tasks at hand before you jumped straight in.
Creating a system
One good rule of organising paperwork is the less you touch it, the better. You need to think through a system of just how you would like those documents to be set up before you start going through them. How do you want to organise them?
A few options to consider are:
- By year
- Specific time frames
- By the customer or client
- The type of document
- By the category
Having a good filing system is intuitive. If you are struggling to work out the best approach, a good tip is to look at the item and think about if you were asked to look for it where would you first look? It doesn’t matter what system you use for your physical files, but you need to be doing the same for the computer files. By doing so, it will help you in the future to identify user-friendly approaches for separating and sorting all documents. Don’t worry, you will thank yourself in the future if you set one of these systems up.
Start in one spot first
You will find that there are so many business documents stored away in a variety of places. You may have a filing cabinet, a few shoved in drawers, the computer has heaps of files, your email may be overflowing and papers can be all piled up on your desk. By now, you are probably feeling very overwhelmed, so make the process easier and less stressful by working through each area, one at a time. Notepad printing is a great tool to become more organised.
Work out your upkeep plan
You will get there in the end; probably with few tears, a few meltdowns and certainly a few cursed words. Now that all your paperwork has been organised, you need to keep it that way. There is nothing worse than doing all that work, only for it to get back to the same messy stage it was before. Avoid going through that stress again and commit to a system that will maintain everything. Docket book printing will organise business dockets for future reference.
It is daunting to go through your paperwork when bits and pieces are everywhere. Some may be missing and some could be stained with coffee rings. Set aside a little bit of time each month when you are all caught up with everything else and maintain your paperwork. You need to physically schedule your paperwork organising schedules and try not to miss one. Put this on your calendar or set up a reminder on your phone so you won’t ever miss that dedicated time to organise all your paperwork.
If you find it too much for you, consider getting a professional in to organise your current set-up and make it better and more approachable than it ever has been before.
