Receipts, Papers and Documents—Oh my!
As a business owner, we tend to accumulate a lot of paper. I know that my desk sometimes looks like an avalanche of paper. Important receipts, invoices, agreements, notes, business cards… just a tree cemetery clogging up your desk! When we get overloaded with paper, it makes it hard to function… let alone thrive.
Well, what are you supposed to do? While going paperless does solve the ‘tree cemetery’ problem, there’s a risk… A BIG risk… that you’re just moving the clutter off the desk top… to well.. your laptop. Guess what?? STILL A PROBLEM.
In the interest of falling back in love with your business, let’s talk about how to wrangle some of those papers, whether analog or digital.
Receipts: Raise your hand if there is a stack of receipts waiting for you? *Looks around and very timidly raises hand* I am SOOOO guilty of this right now. But if you are as well, don’t worry you’re in good company. This is a common problem across the board. First of all, if you’re an organization of more than one, you need a clear expense policy to help keep everyone on track with turning in receipts timely. If it’s just you, start building a habit around reviewing and entering receipts on a regular basis. And by regular, I mean once a week. Schedule it. Look at paper receipts, emails, and invoices every week… Same Bat Time, Same Bat Day. Attach them, enter them, and move on. Now if you’re lucky enough to have transactions load automatically from your bank account into your accounting software…you are NOT off the hook. Louder for those in the back... you are NOT off the hook. You might not need to enter the information, but a receipt still needs to be attached. Schedule it. Do it on Monday morning while you’re sipping your coffee.
Papers: Training materials, notes, post its, business cards, email correspondence, miscellaneous downloads, anything that you might use as reference or reading. Anything *really important* we’ll define as a document (next section). But papers are things that you that maybe you want to hold onto for reference, reminders, training, or other information. Things that are useful… or potentially useful. BUT how useful are they really if you can’t find what you’re looking for? Or if it just sits on the desktop, laptop, or filing cabinet. ‘Future you’ isn’t going to miss this stuff if ‘today you’ can’t even find it. So how do you help ‘future you’ and ‘today you’ get on the same page (no pun intended). We need to start paying attention when a paper (again both analog and digital) comes into your life. At that time, it starts aging. Consider how long is something useful. A week? A month? Six months? It’s important to consider ahead of time how long something actually needs to be held on to. Things like post its and reminders… once that item is actioned… get rid of it. Training, if you haven’t done it in a month, schedule it. If you haven’t done it in six months… get rid of it. Start a filing system… things with a short life should be visible, actioned and gotten rid of. Things with a medium life, the date should be noted and then the thing is filed. THEN… the most important step, schedule a time to review that file. ANNND guess what?? It’s time to determine if the life should be extended or ended. Again, this life cycle is different for every business and individual but know that these types of things need to be reviewed and purged before they take over your life.
Documents: Documents are the things that have a long lifecycle of usefulness in your organization. These are things like tax returns, client records, important communications, and legal documents. All the things that you are going to want to have at the ready for an audit, a customer complaint, or a lawsuit. The issue with these things is that typically we hang on to them… which is good. BUT we don’t organize them. Meaning we can’t find them when we need them. This is where organizations run into trouble, we know we have all the important things. But we just don’t know where. This is where a solid record retention policy comes in! Not only is important to define how long to hang on to documents (check out this site for some guidance around retaining business records) but keeping them organized so you can find them is half the battle. For your record retention policy, define aging documents by type, then create a file structure (either digital or in real life) that ensures that things are filed and organized. And remember, if you write it in a policy, you’re setting the precedent that you’re actually going to, you know, DO IT. So set yourself up for success, create a policy that is manageable and helpful, then follow it.
Does this seem like more work to just clear out your life? You’re right… it is a lot of work. However, it’s also our deal here at Plan-It Documents. We’re your source for policies and procedures made easy… so you can go back to loving your business. Want to know more about how policies and processes can save your business (and your sanity)?
