Fun, mom-geared work-at-home tips and advice on making money on the net.

Organizing a paper filing system for your home office

Posted on January 3, 2007 | 2 comments | Filed in Uncategorized 
 

Is your home office plagued by piles of paper? Keeping your important paperwork filed so you can find it quickly is important when you run a home business. A mom asked a question the other day in a forum about how to organize a filing system for the paperwork in her office.

Here are some tips I shared with her for setup a filing system for your office.

Organizing a paper filing system for your home office:

Make a separate file folder for:

- hot file (do today)
- to file
- to read
- to pay
- to follow up
- to call

- receipts for each month
- each credit card
- each client
- conference/seminar notes by topic
- each topic I am researching to make a product for
- publicity file (where I am going to pitch this year)
- speaking file (where I am going to speak)
- seo file (keyword list)
- each vendor
- swipe files (examples of good sales letters, postcards, brochures etc)
- state/federal papers
- taxes past years
- blank checks
- blank deposit slips
- each project I am working on

I also have a 3 ring binder with my goals and “hot” stuff that I keep by my desk at all times.

- And finally I have something called a tickler file.
There are 30 for them marked 1-30.
If you have an event on the 15th, you drop the flyer for the event there. Then when it’s the 15th, you open your folder for that day and everything you need is there. That keeps you from having a pile of papers related to things occuring on a certain date on your desk.

The best thing to do to create your paper organization system is to take all your stuff, sort it into piles of like things. Write a list with the names of each of the types of things you have, then make a file for each of them. It’s a messy process to take out everything and sort it. But once you have a place for everything, then it’s easy to put everything in it’s place.

What do you do to keep the papers in your office organized?

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COMMENTS

2 Responses to “Organizing a paper filing system for your home office”

  1. Alfa on January 3rd, 2007 10:16 pm

    I will definitely take note of this since I’m organizing my new home office.

    Thanks!

  2. Janet B on December 17th, 2009 11:01 am

    It looks like some of these issues you are encountering when your file could be solved by using software to keep track of your files. You can try The Paper Tiger Filing System to help you better keep track of your files. Give it a try! We are a BBB A-Rated business and are always looking for ways to help people file!

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