What is the best way to finance my growing business?
What is the best software for me to use for my business?
How do I store all the information I so I can find it next time I need it?
These questions and many more are often asked by business owners.
I love it when I come across someone who has a similar philosophy to mine about keeping everything in an orderly way in the office.
So when I found the Time Management Ninja I couldn’t help but explore this web site where Craig Jarrow helps individuals and companies reclaim their time.
Over the past couple of months I’ve been rather distracted by some family health issues. Of most concern has been my 92-year-old mother whose level of mobility has decreased considerably in recent months and has caused her to become very tired just looking after herself.
She has now moved into a rest home where she is being pampered – breakfast in bed, cups of tea brought to her etc – so she can just rest. She’s loving it and she deserves it.
Mum has had home help and meals delivered for a number of years and recently I was witness to assessment by a social worker about the level of care Mum needed. I was intrigued by the paper work involved.
There was a 10 page “User manual,” a 4 page “User Services Agreement” that included a full page of statements that Mum had to sign to say she understood them and all the information she had been given. Then there were two other pieces of paper with lots of information in such small print that I couldn’t easily read it, let alone my mother!
The social worker was very proud of the fact that she took two hours (instead of the obligatory one hour) to go through all this with her “clients”. However at the end Mum just signed so we could have some peace. Too much information and way too tiring!!
Mum also had another assessment around the same time. Interestingly neither of the people making the assessment picked up that Mum was exhausted and needed rest home care as recommended by her doctor. Yet within a week of these visits, she had collapsed and moved into a rest home.
The moral of this story is that assessments and report writing need to be more than just ticking boxes and spending a certain amount of time on them.
They need to be based on expert evidence, keen observation and getting into the underlying purpose of the assessment, preferably by people who have a good understanding of the situation. In other words, don’t just take what is being said at face value, probe to get behind the words and find out what is really going on.
And don’t keep a record just for the sake of it. I can’t imagine what value there is in the reports on my mother when they didn’t even scratch the surface of the problems she was having.
This applies to any business issue. If you have a problem in our business that you don’t understand, talk to people who have in-depth knowledge of the issue; keep asking questions till you are satisfied that you know how to resolve it; don’t be put off by sweet words, especially from the people who may be at the root of the problem.
Above all don’t write a report and then file it just for the sake of it. Only keep meaningful information about your business. If it doesn’t mean anything to you, then don’t keep it.
You can read about more hints and tips to improve your business in my free eBook; and even more if you download the eWorkbook that gives you a full set of instructions on how to set up a filing system for your business.
Judy Owen has been working with businesses of all sizes and complexities for more than 20 years to improve and streamline the access to their business information. She and her team can show you how to reduce risk, improve productivity and increase profits with good business systems and processes in your business.
The recent weather has been very spring like, daffodils are brightening gardens, lambs are frolicking in the rural areas and everyone seems to have got some new energy after the winter.
It’s a great time to put some of that energy to work in your office, especially if it is looking a bit cluttered with papers that have piled up or if you have a desktop screen filled with icons for documents that haven’t been filed properly in your record-keeping structure.
It’s also timely from a business point of view, especially if you’re almost half way through your financial year like I am. If you have a clean-up now you can:
Did you know that once you’ve got your business information organised and at your fingertips you will be able to save up to 15 minutes a day every day. Think about how many non-productive hours that adds up to over one year.
If you think you don’t have time to do a clean-up then take a look at my 15 Minute Action Plan to tidy your desk. It really works. Jill and Sandie among others can vouch for that.
If you can’t find documents easily in your computer, then work through the 15 Minute Action Plan to organise your electronic documents.
When you have your filing system in order you will save time and reduce stress as well as increasing your productivity and profits.
You can read about more hints and tips to improve your business in my free eBook; and even more if you download the eWorkbook that gives you a full set of instructions on how to set up a filing system for your business.
For more than 20 years Judy Owen has been working with businesses of all sizes and complexities to improve and streamline the access to their business information. She and her team can show you how to reduce risk, improve productivity and increase profits with good business systems and processes in your business.
Recently I’ve been working with a small group of people who manage the records for a medium sized business. As soon as I arrived they made a point of telling me that in their newish building, they were located in an area with no view while their IT colleagues were on the other side of the building with views to open spaces and water. This is somewhat typical of attitudes towards Records and IT teams and happens in a lot of organisations.
Locating the records team in this way relegates the idea of records and filing to the days of fling clerks in basements when no-one but he filing clerks knew what information was in what file.
Today it is widely recognized that records are everyone’s business and everyone needs to take responsibility for filing the information they create.
However it is still seen as tedious and nobody really wants to ‘do filing’. They’d much rather someone else did it for them.
Not so easy in the electronic age when individuals can create many documents or spreadsheets or presentations on a daily basis. Everyone needs to know where and how to file their e-docs.
This is where a structure for filing documents is so important. When you go to save a document or spreadsheet or a photo even, you need to find a place for it so you can find it again. It’s also useful to file your document with other items on the same or similar topic.
A ‘Google’ type search on your documents will work if two conditions are present:
This approach is fine in a newish business when there are not many documents but falls over as more and more items are added to My Documents or a shared drive when it takes longer to search through them all or the search engine stops working because of the load.
Even in larger businesses where there might a person or group of people with responsibility for records and filing, their role is more to establish a process and system for you and everyone else to use to file items. They don’t ‘do filing’ except for the items they create themselves.
The other benefit of doing your own filing – electronic or paper – is that you will remember what categories you have used and you will know where to look for items when, at some later date, you go looking for a document that you know is there somewhere, or that you need in a hurry, or if you want to re-use some information you’ve already created.
Re-using existing document is a marvelous productivity booster – but that’s a story for another day.
This is a rather belated welcome to 2013. I expected to be back in touch in late January with news of a new self-help web site for business people. My plan was to establish a site where business owners and managers could use instructional workbooks to set up their own filing system to organise their business information. Unfortunately the new web site has been delayed by some development glitches. I still have no date for going live.
However all the self-help material is ready to go. If you are interested and want to start to develop a new filing system for your business, or redesign an existing filing system that isn’t working so well now, then contact me and I can send you the workbooks and details of how to pay.
I have an introductory offer of 50% of the normal retail price of $297.
So if you buy now you can have the package for only $147.
Be in quickly – this offer is for a limited time only.
How will you prepare your information for preparing your tax returns this year?
Will you trawl through all the paper and electronic files to find the information you need and sort it as you go? Or will you grab everything you can see that might be relevant and drop it into a box and take it to your accountant?
It may be a bit late to get your files organised for the last tax year. But you can make it a lot easier for yourself for next year if you start to sort your tax information now. And if you do have time to deal with last year’s files, then you can follow this advice now – it will just be a bigger job because you have a whole year’s worth of information to work with.
Firstly make a list of all the sorts of information you have and that you need for your end of year accounts. This list will need to include invoices, receipts, bank statements, dividend and interest statements, information about all business income, GST returns, cashbook, assets sold and purchased, motor vehicle log books. If you have an accountant, you will probably get a questionnaire that sets out all the information you need to provide. You can use this to help organise your files so you don;t have a hassle next year.
It doesn’t matter how you store your business information – in electronic form if you run a paperless office or in some sort of paper filing system; you can organise your stuff in the same way.
A large ring binder or two is a good starting point for your paper filing. Use a set of dividers to separate out the different bits of information. You can label these dividers for bank statements, credit card statements, PAYE, GST, invoices out, invoices in, investments, etc etc
For your electronic directory, you can use the same headings for your electronic files.
The important thing is to get your tax files organised so that tax time doesn’t seem such a burden.
Just think how nice it would be if this time next year you could just pick up some organised files, or download your electronic files to a USB stick and hand it to your accountant ready for him or her to do their magic to produce a set of accounts.
And more importantly, just think how much teem you will save by not having to spend so much time finding everything that has been put into a pile somewhere not to mention the smaller bill from your accountant because your tax information was so well organised.
So – its tax time again. Yea!
Do you spend time each day standing waiting while your tea or coffee brews?
Is your desk covered with papers you don’t need today?
Do you spend time each day sitting waiting for your computer to respond or for a document to print?
Are your emails building up in your in box?
If you answered Yes to any or all of these questions, try this tactic to use your time productively with a one minute action plan to clean up your office or desk.
You can use this tactic to move towards having a tidy desk or office even when you’re really really busy.
You are to spend only one minute at a time on each of these actions. Each one minute adds up to a lot of minutes over the course of a day or a week. And you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes to your day and your increased level of efficiency in your work. Try it!!
Organising what’s in your office, on your computer and working out what to do with all that email isn’t the most exciting part of your business. You’d much rather be working with your clients, earning money, networking with the aim of getting new clients and – well actually anything but filing papers or electronic files in a way you can find them again.
And as for those 2500 emails, well forget it; I’ll find the one I want if I ever need to.
There’s nothing new about filing. It’s been a necessary evil for centuries. Did you know that secretaries existed in Rome before the Roman Empire? But men, not women.
Women didn’t get into office work until the industrial revolution on the 19th century.
Filing cabinets were developed in the US in the mid 19th century and this form of storage for office paperwork revolutionised businesses.
By the 1930s women began to dominate the role of secretary. The role of Filing Clerk evolved through to the 90s when these roles were removed from organisations in the name of efficiency. Support staff such as filing clerks were seen as an overhead that contributed little to generating revenue. The outcome of that was the filing devolved to front line people who didn’t know what to do and didn’t want to learn.
Now that has changed again since computers became widely used across all types of businesses. Administrative support staff have a range of duties. Fling papers, electronic files and email has become an important part of good business practices.
For small businesses however it’s often not possible to employ someone to do the office administration, especially when you’re in start-up mode.
It’s even more important then to have a good system set up as part of your start-up activities. Then you get into good habits from the beginning and as your business grows. We can help you for less than $500. Even your bank manager won’t blink at that as s/he will be well aware of the long-term benefits to your business of making that small investment of time and money up-front.
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.