How to Organize Digital Documents?

For both a business and personal environment, organizing digital documents in the right way is increasingly important. However, it is in the business environment where some companies generate losses of tens of thousands of euros due the impossibility of locating existing information in their own databases. 

The fact that any type of document is unreachable can result in the loss of valuable working time or the inability to use information that has been obtained at a certain cost at the time. For this reason, we will consider below some methods of carrying out an adequate treatment of digital documents even your webpage to PDF too. 

Properly organize digital documents

Despite what you tend to think, the digitization of documents does not make storage easier. Files, whether located in the cloud, locally on computers or on private networks, need some file habits and methods that make it easier for users and search engines to identify and locate them.

Establish protocols to store digital information

It is advisable to disseminate among the company personnel the common rules regarding the procedures to be used to store documents: specific rules for naming folders and their files, establishing the alternations between local and cloud use, and organizing the cycles of information backups.

Store all digital documents in one folder

By using a system of sub folders within another main one, the effectiveness of the file finder in the environment used is guaranteed. This also makes the function of backing up documents much simpler and faster.

The use of descriptive file names

More efficient than using acronyms or acronyms, in the organization of documents the most efficient way is to assign names that describe the content of each file. It is faster and easier to find any document that is needed that way, even using a search engine. If your saving webpage to PDF then be sure to give it an appropriate name so that you find it easily when you need it. Although descriptive, the names should not be too long, since most operating systems do not support much more than two hundred characters.

Use more subfolders as file volume increases

When documents of the same type start to be too many in the same folder, it is convenient to start organizing them in new folders that differentiate them by other parameters: dates, alphabetical order, type of documents, or any other organizational method. This must be done without resorting to the elimination of any document, as long as it is not essential for document management reasons.

File encoding with inverted date

Setting the dates inverted in the encoding, writing the year first, then the month and finally the day, will allow the system to automatically sort the folders and files by their date when the alphabetical order is established. Including at the end of each name an indication of the version of each document also contributes to improving the visualization of all of them.

Save each document in the corresponding folder at all times

This is more a habit to be adopted than an organizational method. Forgetting or leaving a document of a certain type in its corresponding folder for later may in the future be a real disappointment, which may even result in the complete loss of that information.

Never erase anything

It is highly recommended to create subfolders for old files or outdated versions of some documents. It is important to keep all the information stored as it would be with its physical versions. At some future time, such information may be necessary.

Keep the backup of your copies with you

While backups can now be performed automatically on cloud services or private company servers, it is also wise to back up hard drives and other physical systems on a regular basis. All precaution is little.

Get the company staff used to checking their local document folders

The key is to ensure that all documentation processed by employees ends up being copied or moved to the organization's server or cloud system, so that the adequate storage and backup of all the information is carried out in a systematic and periodic way.

Although the prices of the programs for document management and organization that are in the market are not very high, as it has been seen, the organization of the documentation consists more in a series of habits of use of the operating systems than in the implementation of an administrative solution. 

Organizing digital documents is a task that needs to be performed on the go, as the database grows: creating folders, subfolders, and new file naming rules based on new needs.