Colors and main categories for documents must be a match!
Are you a visual learner? Do you prefer to add color to your office environment, organize and file your documents by color coding?
As many of us still work with both paper and electronic documents, filing hard copy documents to match our electronic documents is a must. With the increase of documents entering our business world, keeping up is important.
Color coded made easy. Color coded label and file folders have a unique way of helping you to determine where the document should be filed, and helps you avoid misfiles. How frustrating is it to spend more than a few minutes trying to find a document! Calls are waiting, the meeting will be delayed, and/or your sales call will suffer. It is urgent that the document is in your reach within a reasonable amount of time.
How do you set this up?
Review your business categories and adjust any missing categories as you go over your files. Order as many coloured folders as you have main categories. For sub categories, you can use the same color file folder and add the category code on the folder.
Another method is to use a different hue within a main category. For instance, documents filed under the category for administration, you could use a blue and within that category, a lighter color of blue. Therefore, the main categories would have a stronger effect overall.
If you have the time, you can write the code for each document, especially those of major importance. Each time you print a copy from an electronic file, create a new document, or receive a document on your desk such as a contract, you can enter the code immediately. The match for all codes should be the same as all codes for electronic documents. It will improve your office efficiency tremendously.
Not only it is an eye catcher for you, it is an aid that is valuable in saving you and your staff time, space and money. Hidden or lost files are costly and can only create havoc over time with the overflow of documents crowding and lurking in the filing cabinet.
There are many providers of this type of goods and service, and they can assist you in helping you decide on how to plan this well.
Francine Renaud,
Records Management Consultant
http://www.timeouttoorganize.com/
Tel: 250-763-3988
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Thursday, May 5, 2011
E-mail messages as business documents.
Did you ever consider assessing what type of documents are housed in your office files? What are the typical documents found in most of our offices? First of all, we have paper and electronic documents, and other formats such as DVD's, video training material, and others.
Do we consider e-mail to be a part of our business documents? We certainly must.
E-mail has skyrocketed in growth in the past few years, and companies rely on e-mail as a prime method of communication. Information is crucial to their success in business. They are as important as any other document, which make up records we work with on a daily basis.
E-mail attachments have value to your business operations and are created, distributed, and shared instantly without much thought about the long term effects of keeping the attachments, or coordinating them with your assigned categories in your filing system for quick access and retrieval.
This is a time to look at your system and do a simple review and do the exercise with your staff on how to handle e-mail and their attachments. Look at how you have filed your paper and electronic documents,and evaluate each e-mail attachment as you receive it.
Review your files and ask yourself if they are they still needed. Does the company have a policy for the retention periods, how long to keep important or crucial documents? Who keeps what? When there is a mass mail out to employees, who keeps the original message, or in fact, any other message with replies in the same department? Who keeps the record if it has a legal, fiscal, or historical value?
Many employees may not realize that each e-mail message created on their desktop belongs to the company. It is important to be enlightened by what can be requested as e-discovery in case of litigation. What is the content of the message and what is it conveying? Our messages should be written as if they world was reading them.
A simple e-mail message about any business activity, instructions, or discussions may be of importance to decision making, educational purposes, projects, ownership, or requests for e-discovery.
Once you have established that e-mail attachments have a certain value to the company, determine how and what can be kept, for how long, or deleted from anyone's desktop since this is becoming a major problem with the growth of electronic messages accumulating in everyone's mailbox.
Information Technology departments, in certain cases, may request that you limit what you keep and may send a message out to all concerned that there is a deadline for keeping messages in the deleted area, or the number of e-mails permitted in a mailbox. Are there any instructions as to where to keep any documents of importance as the employee should not rely on the e-mail inbox as a storage place.
Francine Renaud,
Document Management Consultant
http://www.timeouttoorganize.com/ Tel: 250-763-3988
Do we consider e-mail to be a part of our business documents? We certainly must.
E-mail has skyrocketed in growth in the past few years, and companies rely on e-mail as a prime method of communication. Information is crucial to their success in business. They are as important as any other document, which make up records we work with on a daily basis.
E-mail attachments have value to your business operations and are created, distributed, and shared instantly without much thought about the long term effects of keeping the attachments, or coordinating them with your assigned categories in your filing system for quick access and retrieval.
This is a time to look at your system and do a simple review and do the exercise with your staff on how to handle e-mail and their attachments. Look at how you have filed your paper and electronic documents,and evaluate each e-mail attachment as you receive it.
Review your files and ask yourself if they are they still needed. Does the company have a policy for the retention periods, how long to keep important or crucial documents? Who keeps what? When there is a mass mail out to employees, who keeps the original message, or in fact, any other message with replies in the same department? Who keeps the record if it has a legal, fiscal, or historical value?
Many employees may not realize that each e-mail message created on their desktop belongs to the company. It is important to be enlightened by what can be requested as e-discovery in case of litigation. What is the content of the message and what is it conveying? Our messages should be written as if they world was reading them.
A simple e-mail message about any business activity, instructions, or discussions may be of importance to decision making, educational purposes, projects, ownership, or requests for e-discovery.
Once you have established that e-mail attachments have a certain value to the company, determine how and what can be kept, for how long, or deleted from anyone's desktop since this is becoming a major problem with the growth of electronic messages accumulating in everyone's mailbox.
Information Technology departments, in certain cases, may request that you limit what you keep and may send a message out to all concerned that there is a deadline for keeping messages in the deleted area, or the number of e-mails permitted in a mailbox. Are there any instructions as to where to keep any documents of importance as the employee should not rely on the e-mail inbox as a storage place.
Francine Renaud,
Document Management Consultant
http://www.timeouttoorganize.com/ Tel: 250-763-3988
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