Getting Organised – The Filing System
I remember a time when life was very simple. People received their wages in cash in pay packets every week. Bills were paid directly in cash to suppliers. Rent was collected by rent collectors, and the man from the Pru collected mortgage payments and insurance premiums on the doorstep. Shopkeepers accepted cash for goods or marked up a slate for regular customers until they could pay at the end of the week when they collected their wages.
Come the 1970s, bank accounts became required to make some regular payments. Credit cards flourished. The 1980s brought video players, the 1990s saw mobile phones proliferating and the internet making accelerating penetration into every household in the UK. By the turn of the 21st century, it became almost impossible to live in society without a bank account, a debit card and at least one credit card, with multiple direct debit and standing order payments to be met.
The entire country moved from cash accounting to double entry bookkeeping of their personal affairs (time delay between receiving services and paying for them) without the majority of the public realizing how to keep their financial house and home in order. The organized amongst us kept papers in files, and now have to keep electronic records in files on a home computer system about suppliers who insist on moving from paper based systems to electronic records, including the government for personal income tax, national insurance and VAT payments. There’s no choice, everyone has to go with the flow or pay somebody else to file electronically on their behalf.
In all this technological change, with its effect on the complexity of life of Joe Average, I have noticed that no matter whether you work in a large multinational corporate, or just contemplate keeping abreast of your bills at home, there is absolutely no consistency of record keeping between companies or individuals, between departments of companies or indeed between people in the same department of the same company. You only have to look at the organisation and hierarchy of SharePoint sites to realize this.
I was fortunate enough over 20 years ago to work for an American multinational that established a global generic hierarchical numbered filing system, allegedly borrowed from the US military, that allowed flexibility yet kept consistency for the end user, and I adopted it for keeping personal and small company records for over 20 years. It has stood the test of time (for me anyway), so I have reproduced it here in this article for anyone who wishes to use it or modify it for their own record keeping purposes.
If you are going to make a wealth plan, you are going to have to know where to find papers you filed away, and also where you filed the electronic records of the same records on your desktop or laptop computer, or more recently on the cloud computing storage areas now offered (free of charge for the time being) by the likes of Google and Microsoft – links provided below.
I have included in this article a high level filing and index example from my own records, being sure to keep to the same hierarchy with both the paper and the electronic records. January 2010 was the first time in ten years that I have revisited, cleansed and adjusted the specific sub-folders in the hierarchy system, so that should be proof enough that the system has survived the technological changes of our lives.
Have fun with it, or ignore it at your peril.
Google Docs
http://www.docs.google.com/
Microsoft Live
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/en-GB/
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