Your Librarian
Large
companies often have a librarian on staff that is in charge of stored
documents, both physical and virtual.
It’s not a bad idea to have this function in your small business,
although you certainly don’t want to devote an entire headcount to it.
Today, a
company librarian might be in charge of the company’s document portal, which is
a very secure area where company documents can be stored. It might be on the company server or in
a secure area of the cloud. There
are companies that offer secure file storage, accessible through document
portals.
The
librarian will also be in charge of creating recordkeeping policies and
procedures.
What’s in a Name
One such
procedure that brings order to chaos is setting naming conventions for client
files and folders. Set consistency
by using a naming standard such as having a client file name always start with
the last name of the client followed by a birth date, or something else
unique.
It will
save time each time you look up a file because you’ll always know where to
look. Even if it’s only seconds
saved per lookup, that time will add up to minutes and hours saved over a year. That will save you labor costs. A naming standard will also look
professional in front of the client.
Permanent vs. Transactional
Get
uber-organized by separating your important long-term legal papers from your
transactional documents. Long-term
papers such as your corporate by-laws and tax returns should have a special
place away from your day-to-day invoices and receipts. Also keep major purchases such as
settlement documents from real estate transactions in a special file that
you’ll keep for many years.
Your daily
transactional files should be batched up by month or year and stored
accordingly. You’ll be able to
delete these files after their retention period is up, while you’ll want to
keep your long-term legal papers almost forever. You still won’t be able to throw away your annual documents
too soon – some agencies require you to keep transactional documents for as
long as 11 years.
Paper or Paperless
What
percentage of your business documents is scanned and stored online? If you’d like to increase this
percentage, then make a plan to convert your paper into scanned documents you
can access online. So that it’s
not such an overwhelming task, break it down into smaller chunks: start with one area of your
business at a time or one vendor at a time.
Purchase a
scanner for everyone in your office, and you’ll soon find your office getting
more and more paperless by the week.
You can also have fun taking pictures of receipts on your cell phone and
uploading the documents to your document portal.
A Backup Plan
So that
you don’t lose your documents to a catastrophe, theft or any other disaster, make
sure you have a backup of all of your documents so you are able to recover
them.
This is
where paperless shines over paper, because there is always risk of fire with
the latter. It’s also where a
secure document portal beats your company server anytime because of the
elaborate layers of security that are required for secure commercial data
centers.
After you
implement these five tips, you may not even need to do a spring cleaning. You’ll be organized and efficient, and
that’s good for business.
