How to Create an Electronic Filing System
Creating an electronic filing system for personal use at home or for many employees in an office differs primarily in complexity of the system. You use the same four steps which depend on a few logical organizing principles. A workable filing system has divisions, often called categories or folders, that don't overlap. It may have subcategories that don't overlap within a category and more levels of sub-subcategories. Users of any of the divisions must be able to distinguish one from another. All users must agree to use the same process for labeling their entries.
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Instructions
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Describe the material you plan to organize and create the categories, or folders, you need to encompass all the material. A system to record all the events that occurred the year you were born might have as major categories: family, local affairs, national affairs, world affairs, economic affairs and social events. If you want to add material from a different year, you must create a new overall topic. Your birth-year material is now a major category and its former categories are now subcategories.
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Create subcategories, or subfolders, for each category. In a business that has autos as one of its categories, create subfolders for each manufacturer, sub-subfolders for each model and a further division into model years. A staff person looking for correspondence relating to Toyota Corollas from 2005 would know where to look.
A law firm involved in a product liability lawsuit involving 2005 Toyota Corollas might keep that material in a separate sub-folder in a different category or make a copy and keep one in each place. A filing system is only useful at any level if you can retrieve documents quickly and easily.
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Prepare a system for filing individual documents in their proper folders. Individuals need guidance because the success of any system depends on proper placement of materials. Some systems have code numbers for every division at every level. The computer directs a document to the required folder by reading the code. You may add the date to the code numbers. If you start with the year, the most recent items will head the list; 09-08-14 is August 14, 2009.
Keywords are a method frequently used to recover data from Internet sites that can work in your filing scheme if users of the system are familiar with the material.
An alphabetical arrangement is useful as an organizing tool in limited circumstances, but tends to be prone to errors in larger systems. A filing system by and for an individual can find alphabetizing helpful.
Software is available that will automatically store documents by type, such as correspondence or legal briefs. Adding bar codes is another way to facilitate rapid retrieval.
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A filing system without regular backups is not a complete or secure system. Large companies have suffered large financial losses when they lost their data. Many now backup to offline storage sites or to their own drives that are kept in a secure location. Individuals can back up their data to disks or second drives at little expense.
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Tips & Warnings
Make folder titles as short as possible.
References
Resources
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