How to Get Your Small Business File Management Out of the Dark Ages
Sometimes the office life can seem like too much to handle. Between pressures from your bosses and pressure from your clients is can feel like there is no margin of error. Where a company thrives or fails mostly has to do with its file management. Gone are the days of large rooms with rows and rows of file cabinets, now days there are options hosted document management for growing business that take advantage of the cloud. Even so there are little things that can be done throughout the work day to make sure that things are working smoothly.
Sort your Email by Content, Files and Media
Do you ever feel like your email inbox is constantly overflowing? If you work in a high paced business it may see like you are receiving emails every couple of seconds. While many people go towards the extremes with inbox management, either accepting the cluster and chaos or vying for always empty inbox, there are some simple steps to take to make your email experience more fluid. One of the best ways to optimize your hosted document management is to first take a look at your inbox. While it might be impossible to maintain an inbox zero it is important to make sure that you have your files tagged and organized accordingly. For example, making separate folders for emails that may contain files or other media. Especially if your company uses certain standard templates regularly, you can save time and space by making sure these files are able to quickly and efficiently accessed.
Embrace the Cloud over Hard Drive Space
Have you ever had to deal with losing a great deal of data because of a failing hard drive. While this may be a big headache in your personal, it can mean major problems for a company. This is the benefit of using a hosted document management platform based in the cloud. The cloud is a colloquial name for a large network of computers that store large amounts of information that can be accessed by the internet at any place and any time. The advantages of local storage should be pretty clear. If your local server was to somehow crash, if you did not have adequate backup procedures than you would most likely lose everything. By relying on a hosted document management solution, you would not have to worry, because each file stored in the cloud has several backups. Using the cloud is just another way to ensure that you spending your time moving forward not digging for the past.
Be Diligent About Properly Disposing and Shredding
While we often talk about file management we think of mostly about how to efficiently manage files and folders and the like. One think that is often neglected is what to do with files that are no longer needed or out dated. In today?s society of cyber theft and other identity crimes, it is important to make sure that files are disposed so that they cannot be retrieved for nefarious purposes. The best way to do this with hard documents is to find a reliable paper shredding service and schedule a regular time at least bi-monthly. For your digital documents there are several applications that can permanently delete files from your computer.
By integrating the above solutions in your work flow, you should be able to see a difference in your file accessing efficiency as well as your security almost immediately.
