Archiving documents is an integral part of file management. Too much paperwork can overwhelm and confuse your staff, so it's best to archive old files. During this process, you're not deleting documents entirely and therefore losing data. Still, you do remove extraneous files that may be confusing or that make searching for documents difficult. As you get ready to take on a digitally managed system, you will find that your office life becomes less cluttered.
You'll go through a little bit of a learning curve to migrate files online, but with time, it will become easier to manage and maintain. Focusing on the wrong software can cost you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars -- not to mention hours of headache.
Discover the 5 most critical apps to help you run your business as well as the ones you probably don't need. Easily save this file to your computer or print it using the link below.
You will also receive an email with your download. The Motley Fool has a Disclosure Policy. For digital file organization, Microsoft offers up Sharepoint, a highly functional but often clunky system. DocSend has a user-friendly interface that makes digital file transfers and management less hectic.
Taking content and document management from the physical world to the digital is a necessity. Choose the right solution, and your organization can make the digital leap quickly and easily.
Check out the best reviews ». The Motley Fool. About The Blueprint. Review Methodology. Advertiser Disclosure We may receive compensation from some partners and advertisers whose products appear here. Enter your email address: Search. Our Top Picks Accounting AccountEdge Pro AccountEdge Pro has all the accounting features a growing business needs, combining the reliability of a desktop application with the flexibility of a mobile app for those needing on-the-go access.
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Appointment Scheduling 10to8 10to8 is a cloud-based appointment scheduling software that simplifies and automates the process of scheduling, managing, and following up with appointments.
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Applicant Tracking Choosing the best applicant tracking system is crucial to having a smooth recruitment process that saves you time and money. Appointment Scheduling Taking into consideration things such as user-friendliness and customizability, we've rounded up our 10 favorite appointment schedulers, fit for a variety of business needs.
Business Checking Accounts Business checking accounts are an essential tool for managing company funds, but finding the right one can be a little daunting, especially with new options cropping up all the time. CMS A content management system CMS software allows you to publish content, create a user-friendly web experience, and manage your audience lifecycle. Construction Management This guide will help you find some of the best construction software platforms out there, and provide everything you need to know about which solutions are best suited for your business.
Browse All. Sign up for The Blueprint's Newsletter Get trustworthy advice to help your business grow. Enter your email address:. Thank you for signing up. Beginner's Guides Our comprehensive guides serve as an introduction to basic concepts that you can incorporate into your larger business strategy. Best Of We've tested, evaluated and curated the best software solutions for your specific business needs. You will notice, however, that this puzzle requires one more piece: a way to organize these digital archives.
Enter the electronic filing system, sometimes called document management software. These computerized filing systems provide electronic file management. In other words, they give us a simple way to store, organize, and retrieve digital files and digital documents. Unfortunately, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of computerized filing software solutions available, creating a maze of options and features that can be daunting.
In this article, we'll point out the most important features and considerations when setting up your own digital filing system. Electronic filing software must do two things perfectly: capture and retrieval.
We often get caught up in lists of minor features, getting lured away by trivial bells and whistles just to later discover that the filing software we chose does not handle these core tasks smoothly — capture and retrieval. So let's look more closely at how these features should work. Capture Scanned Documents. You should be able to scan digital documents directly into your electronic filing software.
The best filing software will double as document scanning software to streamline this as much as possible. Look for automatic document separation, automatic routing, automatic file naming, and built-in optical character recognition "OCR".
Capture Printed Documents. Most electronic filing software provides a way to "print" documents directly into the system. This is usually done through a virtual printer that, instead of printing to paper, captures an image of the document and stores it in the filing system. This is fine for archival, but it doesn't let you save documents in their native format. In other words, you can't edit these captured documents. The filing software must also provide a way to easily capture Word documents or Excel spreadsheets or any other kind of Windows file in its native format.
Leading to Capture the Save Function. The best digital filing system will tie into Save function of your other programs. This is probably the most important factor to consider when picking out a digital filing system. Does the system have an easily accessible and understandable layout?
Does the whole structure of the system seem to be efficient for your file needs? Searchability is key. If you need a filing system, then you probably have a lot of files to organize. While your filing system is designed to keep your materials organized and easy to find, efficient searchability will save you a lot of time.
Consider how easy-to-understand the system is. How do they interact when sharing and opening documents? Does this system allow you to drag and drop files? Are they easily shareable between differing software?
Ask yourself these questions to determine which system will work the best with the software you already use. Security is an obvious factor, but having adequate security is essential.
The level of security you choose is completely a matter of preference; each system will have a different amount of access rights, so determine your needs to select the best filing system. Considering these factors, you can begin to determine the best filing system for you. When it comes to organizing your electronic folders, you have a lot of different filing system options. You might find using your own computer hardware to manually make a digital filing system is the best fit for your needs.
You might like the idea of downloading a digital filing system to keep all your documents in order, or you might decide on an online filing system. Whatever you choose, there are a lot of options for each. We have a breakdown below which will hopefully help you decide. The most well-known filing systems are cloud storage systems.
A cloud system allows access to your files from any device logged into a given account. While a cloud allows organization, it also allows access anywhere at any time because your files are not saved to just one location. Here are some of the most popular cloud storage systems. Google Drive comes included with any Google account. If you use Google for email, then you automatically have 15GB of shareable storage with anyone else who has a Google account.
This standard number of GBs is completely free. If you use an Apple device, Apple iCloud is incredibly effective. However, this software comes with every Apple device, so if your office uses Apple products, using iCloud is a great option. Dropbox is downloadable and accessible from both the web and your desktop. While Google Drive offers you more space for your money, Dropbox can actually sync your files faster than Google Drive.
This is generous when compared to other cloud systems which force you to increase your storage by a larger amount of GB for a much higher price. OneDrive is another great cloud option for file storage. In comparison to some of the other cloud-based systems, OneDrive comes at a much lower price. While Google Drive offers you more space initially, if you exceed that storage amount, you are forced to jump up to GB of space.
Setup your Main folder. Give it a name, perhaps the name of your business. Double click on your new Main folder to get inside it. There is a way to change the standard yellow folders into all different colors, or even to have different icons. Techradar have an article on that here discussing how to do it using Color Marker Free.
They have a free version and paid versions. Inside the Bookkeeping Documents folder open these five folders Inside these five main bookkeeping folders we need to open more folders - starting to dive deep into this filing system now If you have a big load of expense documents you can manage them more easily by opening files for each month within each expense folder and store the vendor documents in month order.
If you enter invoices into your bookkeeping software using the date of the invoice, file the documents in that same month.
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