Elecompack Systems Inc. has been a file supply business for 21 years, and while you think the filing industry is a dinosaur in the digital age, think again! File storage has made leaps and bounds in the past decade, improving your office’s efficiency and organization. Gone are the days where you stuffed a filing cabinet or a legal sized cardboard box with a year’s worth of invoices and documents. Now days you can organize your files to quickly with colour coding to find any document faster than you could on a computer.
How to Start with Colour Coding
Before you order every colour folder under the rainbow, remember that the goal of colour coding is not to be colourful, but colour-purposeful. So the first step is for you to decide on the major categories or groupings of information that you need or require.
Examples of filing might be blue for vendor information, green for client information, and yellow for forms. If you are a dental office, you might do green for dental charts, blue for customer invoices paid, red for customer invoices due, and yellow for vendor documents.
When your files are held in hanging folders with matching coloured interior folders, it will be virtually impossible to misfile, as a different colour will stick out immediately.
Added Organization with Alphabetization
By adding alphabetization to your filing system, you are breaking down your files even further into sub categories. Continuing with our Dental office example. If you had a patient file of green, you could use coloured alphabetized tabs for each patient label. A yellow tab could be for the letter A, a blue tab could be for the letter B, and purple could be for the letter S. This makes it extra tough for you to misplace a file, as a green folder in with a yellow tab would stand out where the tabs were purple. In the feature image above, you can see how the misplaced file stands out at a moment's glance. An example of tabs below are from col-r-tab model 12000
If you have a lot of patients, you can break up your folders even more. For example, for the letter B, you could use the first two or three letters for surnames, such as BA-BD, BE-BH, BI-BN, and etc. It really depends on how many patients you have. If your dental practice is in a Scottish neighbourhood, you might want to break down your “Mc” section even more.
Colour as a Visual Reference
Since people can recognize colour much faster than they can read text, your efficiency improves even more when it comes to colour filing. If you work in the construction trade, you can assign different coloured folders to different projects. Often when you are working on projects, dozens, if not hundreds of meetings happen. Having a distinct colour for each of your projects makes it easy to grab the right folder, and having the folders with you gives you a visual cue of what your day’s agenda is like.
Paper vs Paperless
There are a lot of people that are for going paperless, and while that’s fine for some businesses, it just doesn’t work out for everyone. There’s no reason why you can’t do both. Not every file has to be digital, and on the same accord, not every file has to have a physical copy. Furthermore, for some files you can have a digital and paper version of both to ensure you never lose it.
Benefits of not going paperless:
Remembering Deadlines
Having a red folder full of invoices that need to be paid is easier to manage and remember, then say an email sent to your inbox from the company. A lot of offices don’t pay invoices until 30 days after services are complete, making electronic or email reminders easy to forget. Meanwhile, a red folder full of invoices you need to pay, keeps your mind on track (and avoids your risk of paying late fees)
Secure Filing System
A company’s electronic files getting hacked into is something you hear about almost once a week now. In 2014, Adobe recently had 152,00,000 records leaked, Ebay had 145,000,000 records hacked into and Home Depot had 56,000,000 personal files breached. Keeping your files in a locked room or lockable filing cabinet is a safe way to keep your client’s personal information safe. If the information is highly confidential, you can keep a security camera on it to monitor it at all times.
Avoid File Corruption
Things can go wrong with electronic files quite easily if you’re not careful. All it takes is someone to hit a delete key by accident and all of your files can vanish. If your network is down, you might not be able to access important information either. Having a physical copy of your folder ensures you aren’t always putting your eggs into one basket.
Paper is often the best tool for the job
As far as technology has come, paper is the best tool for many jobs. Paper allows you to highlight key information, circle things, and gather proof with signatures. It's amazing how valuable a signature can be sometimes. If you work in shipping and recieving, items can ocasionaly get misplaced. Finding an invoice with a signature, can save you time in asking dozens of people where the item may have ended up.
Paper can be destroyed
The rule of thumb is that once you upload anything to the cloud, it has the potential to stay up there forever. If you forward a document to someone, you are not in control with who they share it with, or if someone steals it off their computer. With paper, you are in control of how it gets distributed and copied. You can shred documents as well, so they are destroyed forever. This comes in handy if the materials are confidential.
Paper Filing Conclusions
Because of paper’s benefits, it’s going to take a long time for paper to go away. Some argue that paper isn’t environmentally friendly, however, is it any more hazardous then the manufacturing processes we use for our electronic devices today. Furthermore, most electronic devices that are created today, are tossed into landfills after 4 years of use as they are obsolete. Meanwhile, I’ve had the same dental chart for 30+ years. There is no proof that manufacturing all that electronic equipment is any more environmentally friendly than creating paper. Paper is reuseable, recycleable and biodegradable. You can buy printer ink that is biodegradable as well.
If you’re a new business, or a current business that wants to update their filing systems, colour coded filing systems are the way to go. We have 21 years of experience of setting up filing systems, and if you need any advice, we recommend you give us a call.
