Five Steps to Manage Your Office Filing Storage System

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Five Steps to Manage Your Office Filing Storage System

When you are working in an office setting, it is important to learn how to organize office filing systems as many businesses handle a lot of invoices, receipts, and other documents. While  the concept of paperless offices sounds great, the reality is that many small businesses still need to store easily retrievable paper documents. It is important to know what files are most important, who needs to access them, and how they can be retrieved with ease and efficiency. 

Properly filing receipts and invoices is one of the most important duties that a small business needs to do. A non-existent or messy filing system can add days of extra effort at income tax time because you don’t want to miss out on tax deductions due to the missing receipts. As a small business owner, you would need to be able to operate at your desk swiftly and easily. Though setting up a paper filing system may sound difficult, it is an easy task that can be made easier through a few filing tips and tricks.

To get yourself and your business on the right track, follow five steps to make sure papers are easily accessible and easily identifiable.

 

Step One: Assess personal and office habits

  • Think about which employees would need access to files, where they work, and what will make the most sense based on their work stations. 
  • If you are the person who is in the most need of access to papers, think about how you use your workstation. 
  • If that filing cabinet to your right instinctively makes sense, that should be a good starting point. 
  • If it is someone else, get their input of what works for one person won’t always work for another.

 

Step Two: Decide on a filing system

  • What you do as a business will determine, to a certain extent, whether you choose to file numerically, alphabetically, or some other way. 
  • For instance: Do you search for customer information by name or account number? Do you file paperwork by category, such as expenses, financial, marketing, etc.? 
  • This is an important step, as it will determine how you will lay out your filing system. 
  • It is important to do this before you purchase anything for your filing system.

 

Step Three: Calculate storage needs

  • If you have a large number of files that you access daily, they should be at your fingertips. 
  • If you access them less frequently, you might not need them at your workspace, but you still might need them close by. 
  • There may be a combination. Some files might be needed daily while others can be filed in long-term storage further away. 
  • This will enable growth when looking at filing cabinets if you buy something to accommodate twice the files you think you will have now. 
  • This will limit the number of times you will have to reorganize your filing system.

 

Step Four: Invest in a decent labeling system

  • Being able to read file labels may be obvious, but clarity in labeling will save you more filing time than you can imagine. 
  • A lot of companies tend to make labels provide templates that integrate with the most popular word processing software. 
  • You might need to consider one of the small label-making systems that also can print out individual mailing labels. 
  • Items that perform double duty are usually a suitable investment.

 

Step Five: Buy file folders

  • The best investment is to buy colored hanging folders with plastic label tabs and plain manila file folders. 
  • Colored hanging folders are easily available and easily distinguishable. 
  • For instance, if you put all of your client files in yellow hanging folders, financial information in blue folders, and anything related to marketing in red folders, you easily can see where you should be searching for a particular file roughly.

 

Now that you know about these five simple steps, this might make your process of managing and organizing the filing storage system in your office much easier.