Anyone Can File - The Trick Is In The Finding

How efficient is your office filing system?  It is a storehouse for vital information without which your business cannot function – a storehouse where you can immediately lay hands on any wanted item?  Or is your filing system a source of irritation and frustration – an overcrowded morgue where obsolescent material lies side by side with current documents, and items are found by good luck rather than good management?

Good modern filing systems are not particularly cheap to install.  But the price you pay for them is small when compared with the cost of poor systems.  The cost of inefficient filing in terms of wasted space, wasted time, wasted effort, is incalculable.  In fact you pay for good filing whether you get it or not.

There are many different ways to build an efficient filing system – different types of equipment, different methods of indexing.  Whatever the method, the end result must always be the same: information must be filed and found immediately and at the lowest possible cost.  This means the following basic criteria must be satisfied :

• A proper indexing system is essential.  For instance, a conventional single four-drawer filing cabinet holds from 12,000 to 16,000 pieces of paper.  Thus if your business uses a modest 20 cabinets, you are storing around 250,000 documents.  Inevitably, if the indexing system is inadequate or ambiguous, there will be losses and delays.  This leads to friction inside the business, loss of customers and goodwill.  As information cannot be produced promptly, important correspondence is held back; telephone costs rise because customers cannot be kept waiting on line and must be rung back.  Staff; interrupt their work to waste time searching.  If work is not to fall into arrears, overtime must be worked or extra staff engaged.
  
  Randex Ltd. have  specialised knowledge and equipment to provide you with exactly the indexing system you need to fulfil your particular requirements.
   
• A systematic transfer system is necessary since, whilst a good system must contain every document currently needed, it may also exclude all redundant material from current files.  They occupy valuable office space that could be put to constructive use.  They complicate searching; making filing difficult and thus multiply the labour required to maintain the system.  A recent survey of 200 blue chip organisations in the UK showed that 47% of businesses say almost half their existing files are redundant and could be disposed off.
   
• A positive procedure for tracing missing files.  There is nothing wrong in the removal of file from the system by authorised persons; but there is something very wrong indeed if files, however legitimately removed, cannot be subsequently traced.
   
• Physical access to files must be easy.  It is no good having a well designed indexing system if the files themselves are hard to get at.  Filing staff are only human and documents will remain un-filed or be filed incorrectly if access is difficult.