8 Best Ways to Organize Business Files

One of the simplest ways for businesses to get organized is to g company get their files organized. Most businesses have a large volume of documents related to their business. Document scanning companies provide efficient support to help businesses eliminate clutter and keep essential information organized.

Every time you search for a document and can’t find it or have to make unnecessary clicks to access a folder, your productivity is impaired. Relying on document scanning services will ensure that all your files are quickly digitized, making it easy to store them in the cloud or on your internal platform. It helps save time, space, and the struggle you face in every stage of your business.

When you digitize your files, it becomes easy to store files on your computer. But they need to be organized properly. In fact, you will realize the problems that a disorganized system causes only when you can’t find a file you need. Organizing files properly is necessary to maintain the integrity of data. There is no single correct method of organizing business documents, but following the strategies listed below can help you accomplish the task efficiently:

• Save your documents in a shared location, not on your personal computer: It is easy to save everything in "My Documents", but this can cause two problems. One, other people in your company cannot access those documents. You have to ensure that you save files on a server, network drive, or other shared location. It is a good idea to use shared cloud storage. The second issue: your IT people back up network drives and servers, but generally don’t back up everyone’s personal computer. So, if you have your critical documents on your hard drive and the system crashes, you stand to lose everything.
• Keep Business files and personal files separate: Always keep your business files and individual files separate. You don’t want everyone to see your personal pictures. Along with that, you are costing the business more to store and backup your personal files.
• Organize by category: Organizing by category is one of the most effective ways to organize your file. For instance, consider a grocery store, there, foods are categorized like dairy, packaged foods, etc. The technique is figuring out the exact category that you should use to make sense of your business’s size, industry, or the way it is organized. Categories to organize by:

>>Organizing your folders by department or business functions like Finance, Marketing, etc.>>For each client, create separated folders with subfolders for all project details.>>If your business focuses on products instead of individual clients, you will have to organize your folders by product.>>If you want to keep some information private, create separate folders for each user. It is probably not the best top-level category, because it can lead to "tribal knowledge".

• Organize by date: Many business activities like reports or events recur. Organize these by year or month. This will make it easy to recognize the most current files and find past versions.
• Organize by subfolders: After you organize your files into categories, you can include additional layers to compress things even more as subfolders. For instance, you might have a separate subfolder for each project within a client folder. Then within the project, you may have additional subfolders for correspondence and contracts. If you have a single folder with more than fifty files, you might want to add a subfolder; but if you have only a handful of files, you likely don’t need one.
• Format and group files: Keeping files organized based on their formats like doc, pdf, jpeg, excel, and ping is one of the best practices. Doing that makes your file retrieval easier and painless. For instance, you want to retrieve the last meeting minutes, you don’t have to navigate through pdfs and excels. You can get it quicker when you just search for it by format.
• Name files strategically: The purpose of organizing your company files is to make them easy to find. For that, name your files and folders strategically. A good method to name files is to keep in mind the ‘future you’. When storing a file, consider that you will need it in the future and what words you may be using while looking for it. For instance, if you are naming a phone bill, think about how will you search for it in the future. If you will be searching it by date, save it with a name like August phone bill.pdf. It is also important to avoid abbreviations as it may confuse you and chances are high that you may forget them.
• Stick to it: There is no perfect file organization or folder structure; but to remain effective, you should use it all the time, every time. Do not save everything on your desktop or My Documents. You may think that you will move it later but forget about it. If that happens, you will end up with a half-finished file organization system.

Keeping your company files organized is an essential part of being organized. Digitizing office documents with the help of experienced document scanning companies is the first step. Electronic files are easy to organize and can be easily located in seconds. They make your information more manageable and save the time, money, and paper that would goes into hard copy management. Managing and organizing your documents will also improve team collaboration, and boost business productivity and growth.

MOS (Managed Outsourced Solutions) is a leading business process outsourcing provider that supports small to large companies across the US with document conversion, document scanning, data processing, and data entry services.