Any company, regardless of its size, deals with thousands of documents or media files every day, so do not underestimate the importance of properly organized documents. Statistics show that employees spend over an hour a day looking for the data they need, which is unproductive and a waste of time. Instead, you could work on improving your document management system and greatly improve your productivity. In this article, we’ll cover company file structure best practice.
Why is file organization so important to companies?
In addition to the incredible amount of time wasted by employees, document organization is important for several other reasons. When it comes to making any kind of deal, organizations must give their potential partners or investors access to the data they need. Since almost everyone in today’s world conducts transactions remotely and digitally, your documents need to be ready for due diligence one hundred percent. If you give your partners access to a poorly organized environment, it will not only take a lot of time but will also ruin your impression as a responsible company owner. Below we will tell you the best way to transform your data and make, arrange it conveniently and intuitively.
How to organize business files
There is no clear algorithm for organizing data, every company has to find its unique way, but we’ll look at one of the most useful practices for file structure:
- Find out the location
First, you have to decide exactly where you’re going to store all your data. Remember that company documents are the most valuable business asset, and they need proper protection. Hard drive, desktop, downloads, or cloud storage – each of these places has its weighty disadvantages, but by using a virtual data room, you can get rid of many problems at once. They provide a high level of protection, and they help you organize and search for documents as quickly and efficiently as possible.
- Organizing by folder
The best way to keep your files organized is to organize them into folders by defining categories in advance. Structure files by date, event, department. This is strictly up to you, your company, and the events that took place in it. It is not recommended to create too many folders, it will lead to clutter, and create incomprehensible mazes in which your employees and your partners will get confused.
- Create subfolders
Subfolders contain more specific information about something in common, for example, you could create a folder called “Finance 2021” and the subfolders in that folder would contain reports for each month of that year.
- Formatting and grouping files
A good way to logically organize documents is to sign them based on their formats. This will make it much easier to retrieve data, because you don’t have to endlessly go through the scattered PDF or Excel files, but will easily navigate through the names of the folders.
- Name files strategically
The main purpose of organizing files is simply to find them. To do this, you need to think about how to label your folders so that it’s clear to everyone about their contents just by looking at the name. To do this, you must determine what a particular document may be needed for in the future. Descriptively name files and don’t use abbreviations. Even an abbreviation can get you in trouble, there is a good chance you will not remember what you mean by its name in the future. After that do not forget to keep your system clean, regularly review your documents, delete irrelevant data, and properly enter new ones, so that after a while your files do not become chaos again.