!#44# Best Practices paperless office - Establish a standard naming convention for your paperless office

!±8± Best Practices paperless office - Establish a standard naming convention for your paperless office

The concept of the paperless office is a reality. And with today's technology is cheaper and easier to reach even a small home office. To maintain the success of "paperless office", it is important for you to establish a simple naming convention for all your electronic documents. If you follow a well-defined naming convention, it is easier to find documents, use again and again and stay paperless office.

A naming convention is simply a well-structuredIt set the standard for electronic documents. Keep things simple and you can understand logically, so that anyone can easily access your documents, and follow your naming guidelines.

For example, a simple and logical name are the bills for your home:

[Date]. [Company]. [Type]. Pdf

With this convention, you can share your captured "bill" statements have the following fileName:

2010_01_01.ComEd.bill.pdf 2010_01_15.Verizon.bill.pdf 2009_12_15.Verizon.contract.pdf

Immediately, only to look at the file name, you can say that these documents are the electricity bills and telephone bills. You can also immediately identify the dates for each statement invoice. In the last example, you can quickly see that this is the agreement "contract" with your phone service.

This is just a simple example of a naming convention. WhenDefine your own naming standards, maintain a structure that best support as you think and organize your office.

And not for the stress on your naming structure perfectly at first. The nice thing about a paperless office with all your documents in electronic format (copy) files on your computer you can easily change your standards and naming tree of folders in the future.

I recommend the "data" used in the first part of the file, andFormat as [YYYY_MM_DD]. Use the full [four-digit year], then [two-digit month] and [two-digit day]. Following this special format for dates before all the file names, then you have the opportunity to view the file, the type of "name", so you have another way to quickly obtain the documents in chronological order within each folder.

How to develop and maintain your paperless office for the simple naming convention, along with a logical and well-defined"The tree of folders" will go a long way to keep your electronic documents organized and efficient.