simple filing system

Three options to grow my business

After many years of working with corporate and government organisations to organise their information resources so they are easy for staff to find and use, I’ve more recently turned to working with SMEs to assist them with organising their offices so that they can find the information they need when they need it.

When I started my business 10 years ago, the only advice I got was from my accountant who told me I needed to keep my financial records for seven years.  Nothing about how to keep them, what else I needed to keep (eg staff files) or how long I needed to keep them (apart from the financials!).

Two years ago I did some research and found that the situation for SMEs was much the same as it was 10 years ago.

So I created this business stream and now I specialise in working with individuals and small groups of people so they can get their email inbox under control, organise their electronic documents and sort out those piles of papers lying around the office.

Up till now I’ve been delivering this service personally and with one or two other specialists who I have contracted when I’ve needed them.  This approach is no longer sustainable unless I bring other people into the business.

It seems to me I have three options to grow my business and to give me an exit strategy.

  1. recruit suitable people to help me deliver a personal service
  2. develop training material for online delivery
  3. a combination of 1 and 2  by having training material for online delivery with personal service as backup support

I’m interested in your views on the options I’ve set out – are these viable? What other options could I consider? Please do let me know your thoughts.

Put your tools away at the end of each job

I was asked to speak to at a meeting of business people last week. The topic was how to organise your office and improve productivity in your business.

My talk featured email organisation and management, organisation of electronic documents and that perennial problem child – paper and how to keep it under control on your desk.

The topic attracted a larger audience than normal for this business forum! I think the idea of an organised office linked to improved productivity (and thus increased profits) was somewhat intriguing to the group.  Certainly there was a lot of discussion during the course of the meeting.

What I said resonated with many of the people in the group.

One chap had a particularly pertinent comment on how he manages his office.  He said that when he was a motor mechanic, he had a rule that he put all his tools away at the end of each job.  Now he is in business and mostly working in the office, he follows the same rule.  When he finishes a job he puts everything away, whether it’s preparing quote, getting tax information ready for the accountant or recruiting a new staff member.  When the job’s done the tools are put away. That is, all the paper is filed and the electronic documents are filed and closed; relevant emails are filed (as an electronic document) or deleted.  That keeps the inbox clean as well.

Now how simple is that?   It is something we can all use in our day-to-day office work.  And wouldn’t our desks be tidy at the end of each job and the end of each day!

The extra bonus is when you have a simple but effective filing system so you can put everything away and know you can find it again quickly and easily next time you are working on that particular job.

And the link to productivity? If you have an effective filing system you will save time every day because you won’t be scrabbling around looking for that supplier price list, your GST receipts, or the tender document you prepared but you can’t remember where you saved it.  You could save up to 30 minutes a day. That’s 2½ hours a week, more than 100 hours per year.  Think about how you could use that time.

 

 

Feral paper in your office

Has paper gone feral in your office? You know what I mean, piles of papers on your desk, more on the floor, paper everywhere in fact.

It used to be organised and filed once, but then you got busy.

Now you’ve forgotten how you used to organise your paper files and you’ve started storing some of it electronically. But you don’t want to throw the paper away in case you can’t find the electronic version.

And so it goes on.

Help is at hand and you don’t need to be in a city to get that help.
First up let’s look at some hints and tips so you can start to tame those feral piles of papers.

  1. Clear a desk or table or even some space on the floor
  2. Get a large rubbish bag and put it beside your cleared space
  3. Decide on a 15 minute block of time to work on the feral paper
  4. Pick up one pile, no more than 20 cm high, and put it in the cleared space
  5. Pick up each piece of paper and decide if you still need to keep it. If you don’t need it, put it in the rubbish bag. If you do need it, put it in one corner of your cleared space.
  6. Repeat with the rest of this pile, sorting the papers into smaller piles with similar items, eg all bank statements in one pile, credit card statements in another, research articles in another etc, etc

Try not to get distracted by anything that looks particularly interesting.  Your 15 minutes will disappear in no time.  Put these interesting items in a separate pile and make a date with yourself to read them another time.

Next steps:

  1. Find a permanent home for those items you are going to keep so you don’t simply create new piles of paper
  2. Get a system in place to help you decide how long you need to keep certain items
  3. Decide if you need to keep a paper copy or if an electronic version will be sufficient
  4. Make a time to go through another pile tomorrow or in a few days.  Put the time in your diary.

If you need more help contact me. The Terrace Consulting file tamers can visit you in person, can Skype with you to talk and have a look at your paper and advise you, or we can simply talk to you on the phone and give you some ideas to tame your paper filing.

Selling your house? Give your home office a makeover first

Friends of mine moved house recently and I caught up with them in week two in their new home.

By then most of their life was sorted and everything had a place in the kitchen, garden tools were stored neatly in the garden shed, the linen was neatly stacked in a hall cupboard and the PC ‘s were set up in the home office.  But there was still some visible pain.

Read more

What does gardening have in common with filing?

rengarenga lilies

Last weekend I was in the garden cleaning up around the rengarenga lilies that had been home to snails for some time. (If you don’t know these plants, they form low bushes of long fleshy leaves and a myriad of white flowers in spring and summer).

As I pulled off shredded leaves that the snails had feasted on, and scraped up the dead leaves that I’d left there to compost (but in fact had become snail birthing units and nurseries), I pondered on the wisdom of my strategy that effectively left the garden to its own devices.

Then my thoughts turned to other chores that are often left to their own devices and the mess that ensues. Take filing for example.

Read more

Paper or electronic filing – or both?

Do you store your business information in paper format or in electronic formats? Or both?  Do you remember the logic behind your decision about what to file where and in what format? How do you decide what to do with incoming items?

It can be very confusing when you start to think about a filing system for your business.  You have the electronic files you create; you have stuff coming by email and other stuff coming in paper form through your PO Box and that suppliers hand to you in paper format.

Electronic filing only

If you decide you are only going to have an electronic filing system, you need to be able to scan all the valuable paper business information that arrives at your business.  You need access to a scanner and have a routine so that the scanning gets done regularly. If you don’t, the scanning is left to pile up in an ‘in tray’ or a ‘to be scanned’ tray.   And then it becomes a real chore, just like any pile of filing.

Your process needs to include selecting what paper information you will find useful in the future, useful enough to make the effort to scan and keep.

Then you need to have a list of topic headings so you can store similar information in the same place each time, even if bits of information come in weeks or even months apart.  Scanning and then storing the scanned item on your desktop or in ‘My documents’ may work while you only have a few documents.  It’s going to become hard to find once the volume builds as your business grows.

Hybrid filing – paper and electronic

You may prefer to store the paper based information in physical folders instead of scanning them. But then you have the issue of finding relevant electronic information when you want to see everything to form a full picture.

You can do this by using the same list of topics or subjects for both your paper and electronic files. When you start out you may get away with a simple list, maybe in alphabetical order.  As your business grows, you will probably need to have sub-headings.

Paper filing only

Obviously this is the other side of the first option described above.  If you are going to use a paper filing system as your ‘official’ business you will need to print out everything that you produce from your computer and put the printed version in your paper files.

This will be very time consuming and probably counter-productive.  I don’t recommend this but it is workable if you really need everything in paper.  After all it was the only way to file business information before we got computers

 

Simply filing

Last week I wrote about the amount of time wasted in businesses because people can’t find bits of information quickly and easily.

Following on from that, there are two important aspects to consider when it comes to organising your information.

First you need to store it somewhere – and you need to be able to find it again

It’s the finding it again that creates the most problems for people – at home or at work, in small businesses or big corporates.

You need a filing system that is simple, covers all aspects of your business and most importantly – it has to be intuitive to work for you and your team so that it becomes second nature. If it’s not you won’t use it.  Then you’ll be back wasting time hunting around for information you know you have but can’t find.

I want you to stop wasting that time and putting it to productive use in your business.  Problem is that you are concerned that if you put time into getting a filing system, you won’t do real work that brings in business revenue.

I can already hear you already saying Oh – I haven’t got time for that.  But hang on – how many hours did you say you were spending each week looking for information?

And how long will it take to set this up – I’d say 10 hours all up.

So think back to the figures I gave you last week about how the minutes spent looking for information grow into hours and the $ cost of those hours.

Now here’s the nitty gritty for this week about creating your filing system. There are two main ways – one is a formal system with a hierarchical structure. The other uses keywords that are meaningful for you and your team.

You may already have a keyword-based system – with folders for paper and for electronic files labelled with a word or short phrase that describes the content of those folders. These may be organised in alphabetical order or be grouped with folders containing similar information.

So you already have the beginning of your filing system.

As your business becomes bigger and more complex, you may end up with a myriad of folders that you have to wade through whenever you need to find a piece of information.

At this point you may need a more formal structure that has a series of sub-folders.  The trick is to have top-level folders with meaningful labels that can cover all the activities in your business.  Then you need to make sure everyone in your team uses the system every time they want to store some information.  Whether it is sales receipt or customer contact details – each of these must be stored in the same place as other similar bits of information.  Otherwise the system won’t work.

It entirely up to you to decide what will work for you and your business.  Once you’ve decided on what labels to use and how to organise your folders, then you can decide what sort of folders you want to use for your paper files, how to match the paper filing system with your electronic files and if you want to include email into the mix as well.

It’s all possible. It does need some time and effort up front though.  But I can guarantee you that if you set it up well in the first place, you’ll reap rewards through increased productivity within a very short space of time.  You might even reduce the risk of IRD penalties through late filing of tax returns.  Now there’s an incentive to sort out your filing systems and habits.

You might want to give me a call or email me to get some help to get started. I’ll be delighted to get your call or email.

What causes lost productivity in your business?

What activities come to your mind when you are looking to improve productivity with your team? Sickness? Long coffee breaks? Smoking breaks? Absenteeism on the day of major sports events?

But what about the time you spend looking for all your sales receipts at GST time? Or the time you spend rewriting a letter or report because you can’t find where you or someone else saved it on your computer system?

Has it ever occurred to you that this is another real cause of lost productivity?

This productivity loser is hidden or invisible because people look as if they are working as usual; they’re not missing from their desk or other place of work.  And they are working as usual.

But – working as usual includes spending time looking for information they need to work effectively but can’t find readily. And because this is the way it’s always been, everyone tends to accept it as the normal way to work.

Research has shown that people can spend up to 30 minutes a day looking for information that can’t be found easily.

Wow – just think about what that does to productivity in your business – time that could be spent on more valuable work that would add to your bottom line not subtract from it.

But that doesn’t happen in your business, you say?

Let’s look at it a different way

Analysis of the research findings indicates that the average person spends 10 minutes searching for a single piece of information. This might be sales receipts, supplier contact details (where’s that business card?), a monthly sales report.

On average this will happen 3 times a day.

10 minutes x 3 times a day = 30 minutes of unproductive time per person

½ hour x 5 days = 2½ hours per week

2½ hours per week x 48 working weeks = 120 hours (15 days) per year – per person

Now let’s put some dollars into the mix

For someone on $30,000 a year, this works out to more than $1,200 wasted each year.

For someone on $70,000 that’s almost $6,000 per year.

And add in more people – let’s say 5 staff

Five people each on a salary of $30,000 will cost you more than $6,000 a year by wasting valuable time looking for pieces of information.

That’s 4% of your costs for those people each year! Can you really afford to throw away that much money each year?  What else could they do with that time?

You can download this spreadsheet and plug in your own figures for your business to see how much invisible productivity wastage you have in your business.

Next week I’ll have some hints and tips for how you can reduce this wastage in your business.