Elevate’s Best Practices for Document Management

Every business has hundreds, if not thousands, of documents floating around at any given time, so it’s crucial that you understand how to manage them well.

Without proper document organization and systems, you’ll waste valuable time searching for what you need internally and what you need to share or send to your clients.

We are experts at creating customized document management solutions for our clients, so we asked our EAs to spill the tea on what they do behind the scenes!

Document management struggles

Using a drive does not count as a document management system.

These are some of the main struggles our clients report when it comes to managing documents within their businesses:

• Lack of file or folder structure
• Too many folders or sub-folders
• Not using naming conventions
• Duplicating documents
• Losing signed or confidential documents

Read through that list and then take a hard look at your document management system to identify gaps in your process or missing systems.

Best practices for managing your documents

Instead of throwing everything into a random drive, forgetting what you called the doc, and then spending 25 minutes trying to track down what you need, our EAs suggest doing the following:

• Audit your Drive to see what exists, what needs to be created, and what can be deleted
• Establish a basic folder structure outline: Operations, HR, Legal, Marketing, Sales, Clients/Customers/Vendors, Accounting.
• Identify the ideal file and folder layout and create an outline to follow
• Create consistent naming conventions to make it easy to find documents in the future
• Create user groups so you don’t have to individually give access to files/folders
• Separate business and personal files
• Only use one Drive whenever possible
• Create one set of template documents to duplicate and work from when needed.

Need help with your document management?

Don’t waste valuable time searching for documents—those minutes add up to lost days or even weeks of work over the course of a year! Use these best practices to organize your documents and make it easy to always access what you need.

If the thought of taming your document disaster is too much to put on your plate right now, you should consider turning it over to the Elevate team. We can either step in and provide ongoing EA support or create a custom partnership for a short-term document organization project. Either way, we have the skills and expertise to get your business streamlined, organized, and optimized!