I have a small side business, and I'm trying to come up with a consistent method of filing.

I have all the usual items (invoices, purchases, vendors, receipts, tax items). I'm paperless with three separate backups, so space isn't an issue. I've also been using OCR, so I can search within documents.

I'm just wondering what best practices you guys have come up with so I'm not reinventing the wheel.

If that makes sense.

I've created a number system for jobs and invoices.

RVS-2203-1-1-045

RVS - Company initials. I have other sub-companies, so this can change.

-2203-
Year 2022, March:03
The year and month that the job is engaged/contract is executed and funded.

-1-
Means a narrative commercial appraisal report.
I have a chart of all the job types, 1-22 currently.

-1-
The number is the employee number, in this case, our MAI/AI-GRS Designated Commercial Appraiser who is a senior partner at our firm. I'm -2-.

-044
This is the job number. This is assigned as jobs are engaged, we don't assign a job number until the contract is signed and funded, so we don't typically skip numbers. We only get 1 or 2 cancellations a year and we charge a fee for a cancellation so it still needs a number for our books and records. Typically we get up to about 180-200 jobs a year.


Then for invoices, we abbreviate the job number, so an example of the above job would be: RVS-2203-044INV.
Additional invoices might be -044EFINV for engagement fee invoice, or -044LF1INV for the first late fee.

On the computer, each of our company computers uses the same system, but my computer is the master for finals of everything. Each year, each company/business license gets a folder with jobs. We use our file number as the folder name, followed by a brief title and the city of the job, so: RVS-2203-1-1-044, Sigforum, Soldotna

At the close of each job each employee brings me the entire workfile and it goes into that folder. Final products are delivered from my computer. Each employee/partner has a single working folder which all relevant documents and files are auto saved into, which backs up to our network drive running in Raid. My computer backs up to that drive the company folders. Each appraiser keeps a copy of the workfile they worked on, and writes it to a WD Extreme SSD rugged. They are responsible for its safety, I toss mine in the fire safe each Friday.

We don't back up anything to any cloud.

Tax related things I keep in a folder of the relevant company, by tax year.

Paper receipts get tossed into the relevant job folder if they are directly related (like gas to get to the job site, or a marshall swift cost estimate, etc.) My partner is 100% digital, she scans hers and then tosses them. I still have paper job folders and I clip mine into the folder. Regardless, at the close of each job all the direct expenses get entered into our books. I made my own chart of accounts in excel, I hate QuickBooks, and Peachtree took too much time. Neither tweeked well to our business, so I just spent a week and made a template for us that works a few years back.

Every folder, invoice, expense gets the job number written or printed on it. It's in the header or footer of every document related to the job. Being consistent helps immensely when it comes time to put expenses where they belong, report our sales taxes collected, renew professional liability insurance, input the job statistics into our comparable sales/leases database, or just enter statistics for the waiting room video show.

Expenses not related to jobs directly, are kept in a similar system by date and year, and by office. We have 4 locations right now.

When I owned my own business, I created a folder for each individual job. Inside it went all correspondence, files, source code, schematics, architectural drawings, RFQs, Quotes, Invoices, anything and everything pertaining to that specific job.

That folder went into another folder titled "Jobs In Progress 20XX" or "Done Jobs 20XX" or "Losers 20XX".

Expenses and income all went into Quicken upon completion of each individual job.

Made it very easy to go straight to what I needed.

This is neither here nor there, but for a numbering system, I like how my agency does our case numbers. Here is a case number of a report I did early this morning: P220323-0228.

I have no idea what the ‘P’ means, but that could be customized as any other letter which describes a file like ‘E’ for expenses.

The ‘22’ is for the year, the ‘03’ is for March, the ‘23’ is for the 23rd day of the month, and the ‘0228’ is the number of reports up to that point. We’re a small agency so we only have 228 police reports as of that deer strike report I did this morning.

So, a case number means something to us when we see or hear one. I see other agency case numbers which also make sense so ours isn’t special…it just works.

I ask my wife where I put it.

Mine seems to be more geologic than anything else…once I get to the correct strata I’m golden.

It all goes into the folder marked M for miscellaneous.

Shoebox under the bed.

File for each customer

I have had some form of a side business for about 20 years. I haven't needed anything more than excel. I built all my own spreadsheets to run everything I do. Any paper receipt gets scanned and stored digitally.

I was going to offer that I went digital but you're already there.

The one difference I see between how I file electronically and how others file is the date naming condition. Whether you prepend the date or put the date at the end of the file name, people often type out May 4, 2021 or something similar. I use "yyyy mm dd" and file explorer naturally sorts them in order. If I need to add more sort, I use yyyy mm dda with the "a" incrementing through the alphabet.

Another tip is to look at the nature of your information set that you are tracking. Are you tracking big projects that takes years to complete? Then file them in separate folders named by date and project name.

Do you use file names that make sense to you like Vendor XYZ yyyy mm dd? Or would it make sense to name the files with the date first?

When needed, I force a sort by prepending the file names with 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 2c, etc.

You may also want to have an archive volume to store files that you want to keep so that you can have a separate place for your "active" files.

Another thing I do is I have my sensitive files in a "secret" volume on my hard drive that is "invisible" unless I unlock it. I use Rohos Disk Encryption and have used it for at least 5 years. It was only $23. My physical data mirrors are also in hidden volumes, my backups are password protected, and my cloud mirrors are encrypted with zero knowledge.

Sedimentary, If I know about how old it is, I know about how deep it is.

Thanks all for the replies. Very helpful.