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Organization Will Save Your Organization

In the office, you had a small corner of the corporate world from which to ply your trade. You may have had a cubby in cubicle city or an office with a window. Either way, your space was compact, standardized, and vacuumed by the night cleaning crew. Not so at home. Unless you live in a studio apartment, you home has multiple rooms to spread out your stuff. And stuff can make a mess. Receipts, contact business cards, and paperwork all pile up quickly. Mix in your personal bills, magazines, and junk mail and you have business paper chaos. Searching through stacks of paperwork reduces productivity and can lead to errors. Organization isn’t complicated. It just requires a little extra effort and a method to sort through the madness.

Step 1: Set aside space for a filing cabinet. In today’s electronic business world much is done through e-mail, fax and phone, but paper still exists and needs to be stored. Create a file for bills, customer documents, and receipts. You may need these documents for backup if questions arise about work you have performed or bills that require payment. They also come in handy at tax time when you are searching for deductions.

Step 2: Set up a filing system on your computer. This filing system can mirror your paper filing system if you like consistency and will be scanning in paper documents for backup. Otherwise, choose categories that make the most sense. My system includes folders for each client. Within the client folders I include invoices, client work in progress, important e-mail messages, and faxed documents. I also have folders for business receipts that I receive through e-mail.

Step 3: Organize your contact information. Losing contact information is a quick way to miss business opportunities. Contact management or spreadsheet software such as MS Excel provides a single location to store all your contact information. Contact management software has the added advantage of being able to track client conversation notes, reminders, and documents in one place.

Learn more about managing a home business in Managing Your Business the Toddler Way by Michelle Novak.

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