Office organization - share your tips

[M A V I C]

Getting more organized is now more important to me. I've got a few things I do to keep some stuff organized. I would like your suggestions as well, and I think many of us can benefit from this info.

So what do you do to help keep your office organized? Here's a few things I do.

• Pay bills online and save all receipts as PDFs
• All invoicing and accounting is done electronically

[AlphaDog]

Honest question: Does it really save time and energy to scan receipts? Personally, the systems I use at home and used for our business require virtually no extra time. I usually handle them only once, and that's pretty much forever. I look at the receipts, enterthe data into a spreadsheet, then I stick them in an envelope or file folder. All information I need at tax time is already in a spreadsheet, so the only time I touch them again is on the rare occasion when I need to see an original for some reason.

I've seen others suggest scanning, but I've never been able to see the value. ???

[M A V I C]

I didn't mean scanning paper receipts, but printing the digital versions as PDFs and saving those.

[AlphaDog]

Oh, OK. Duh. I'd just read another thread a little further down, and Modelamac had described his process of scanning all his stuff. When I read 'PDF', I guess the other post was going through my mind. His was here:

http://forums.macresource.com/read/1/333090

I now understand. Even I save stuff as PDFs sometimes, and I'm pretty old fashioned.

[bfd]

Shelves, lots of shelves.

[WHiiP]

If you do correspondence using snail mail, then you can have some templates saved in your word processor program for such. Like a solicitation letter, a thank you letter, a billing letter, a first stage why haven't you paid yet letter, newsy type letters built around various holidays and used to keep in touch with your clients when you don't have any current business with them, etc. Whatever you use correspondence for. This would also work for e-mail, if you use it a lot.

And, instead of a template, a hand written Thank You note to the right person does wonderful things to an ego. Especially when their name is spelled correctly.

[tuqqer]

Read David Allen's cheap little book, called Getting Things Done.

Learn the art of Zero Inbox

These two things have been the best tools I've gotten in the last couple years for personal productivity and organization.