How To Organize Your Bills, Records & Receipts Systematically?
This winter, make your mind to take out a few hours from your busy life schedule and declutter your office space. Here is how you can begin with it.
Are you fed up of the growing stockpile of physical records in your office? Are your office-drawers are overflowing with bills, receipts, and invoices, yet waiting to be stored or filed? Have you even failed to analyze over which documents to throw and which are to retain? If your answer is ‘yes’ to all of these above-mentioned questions, then you are probably in dire need of records storage systems for your office.
So in this winter, force yourself to re-introduce new forms of records management systems within your office and take a firm oath to de-clutter your official bulk paper-works, once and for all. Here’s is how to start with, it.
Manage Your Paper Works In 5 Steps:
Find the Invaluables Out Of The Trash!
Before learning the top most effective ways of physical record management, you first have to identify which records are necessary and which are not. It’s a job which requires immense patience and precise inspection. This can be done in the following steps.
· Segregate your records in different segments like bills, receipts, invoices etc.
· Identify your valuable & critical records, mark them in a proper colour code.
· Separate the entire collection in two parts-Necessaries & Unnecessaries.
· Find out a temporary storage-space where you can keep the necessary records.
· Finally, Shred or destroy the entire burden of the worthless physical document.
Categorization & Classification of Records:
Not all records belong to the same category, neither they serve the same purpose. So arrange your entire stockpile of valuable physical-records in the following different categories and classes respectively.
Personal Records:
ID cards, PAN cards, voter ID cards, passport, birth/death/marriage certificates, mark sheets, training certificates etc.
Employee Records:
Employee database, offer letters, increment letter, attendance sheets, performance sheets and salary slips.
Banking Records:
Bank Statements, credit card literature, transaction bills, documents related to loans and agreements etc.
Financial Records:
Accounts books, Financial Entry’s, Tax returns, acknowledgments, Sale records, purchase orders, bills, receipts, and invoices.
Investment Records:
All kinds of paper works and printed materials that represents information related to stocks, mutual funds, term deposits, PPF, small savings schemes, and bonds.
Legal Records:
Will, Power of Attorney, Trust Deeds, Property Documents, rent agreements, contracts, Business MOUs.
Secret files and documents:
Records which fall under the purview of copyright and intellectual property acts, research papers, engineering drawings etc.
Insurance & policies:
Records and document for all kinds of insurance and policies(Life. Health, property, vehicle and other covers).
Document Filing & Indexing:
After categorizing records in different segments, you will have to file them as per their type, purpose and retention schedule. Each and every file and as well as the individual records contained by them should be indexed in a systematic order so that they are easily accessible and relocatable.
Most of the organization use colour coding and alphanumeric records indexing methods because both of these are cost-effective. However, you can also choose RFID based barcode record indexing mechanisms for faster results.
Develop Your Own Records Storage Facilities:
In most of the offices, people tend to stuff their paper-based records and documents in drawers or store them at random places across the office and never walk around to restoring them. Often, this kind of small mistakes further leads to inevitable chaos, when a particular document is required. So, do not forget to move your records from the temporary storage to a permanent one. Following is list tips that will help you to build your own document archiving facilities.
● Use Document Trays:
keep your everyday records like etc permission slips, bills, invoices, birthday cards in your ‘In-box’ and ‘outbox’ document-trays. These documents treys are like temporary storage cases, allow you to track and distinguish between the approved and disapproved files. Verified records must go into the ‘inbox’ trays. Records yet to be verified would go to the outbox trays.
● Filing Cabinet:
Household filing cabinets are probably the most commonly used records storage platforms available in the market. These documents storage infrastructures are extremely useful for storing records which are not active at present but yet relevant for future usage. Some of the most popular types of filing cabinet are listed as follows :
● Lateral file cabinets.
● Vertical file cabinets.
● Mobile file cabinets.
● Flat file storage cabinets.
● Side tab filing systems.
● Card file storage.
So, what are you waiting for? If you have to store or manage a large volume of physical records, just build your own filing cabinet now. Trust me, these are easily affordable and can help you to keep track of your critical documents which aren’t necessarily in regular use but possess a tremendous amount of corporate value for future.
● Wall Files/ Hanging File Cases:
Wanna transform your household-RMS into a simple, effective but highly accessible paper storage? Well, You should Install some hanging-wall files and large magazine holders on your office walls and label them in proper order.
These hanging folders can not only provide enough space for your regularly used records and documents but would also help you to remain your documents visible and fresh, all along the day and night.
● Wire Wall Bins:
Looking for a highly accessible but a light-weight record’s storage frame for your rolled up engineering designs and drafting papers? Deploy some wire wall bins on your empty office walls, just in front of your cabin.
● Cork Board Cabinet:
Never keep all of your physical documents all in one place. Documents like official notices, announcements, invitations, motivational arts, general purpose rules, and regulations, often tend to clutter here and there in your office. Get a Corkboard cabinet and fix them all within it.
● Commodious Storage Cubbies:
Cubbies, one another essential platform for office record management, are nothing but large-sized storage cabinets made up of woods, plywood and steel. Most of the times, Cubbies have built-in drawers and enough storage cages which are often referred to preserve large volumes of valuable and critical paper records, books and research papers.
Digitization, Scanning and Imaging:
keeping records in physical forms often become a severe burden for most of the individual and organizations. It seems like a tedious process, especially when you have to manage thousands of paper-based records and documents on a regular basis.
But thanks to the document digitization services- With it, you can simply eliminate this problem once and for all. To achieve this goal, first, you have to buy modern day printers and Scanners. In this context, LASER Scanners would be the most viable option for you.
Once the scanner and printers are brought in, just begin the process of document scanning and records imaging. Scan the entire stockpile of physical records and store the soft copies in hard drives or in a password protected online servers.
Doing this would help you to ease the process of document retrieval. It would also allow you to access, identify, retrieve and dispose of any of your records and documents, just within a snap of a finger.
Recycling and Paper Shredding:
Documents which are out of their retention period and has no future value must be destroyed immediately. This entire process records destruction is known as paper shredding and It is an irreversible or a permanent destruction process.
Managing records with complete efficiency is not a five-finger exercise. For most, it has been a hectic and time-consuming process which brings extra workloads. And to Avoid this, you just have to align with SRM-India’s most preferred Record Management Company.
