Is the back-end of your business in a state of chaos?

It’s so easy to become overwhelmed when running a small business - I mean you often wear ALL the hats, are juggling multiple projects with tight deadlines and a tonne of files to manage and organise. So whether you’ve identified it or not, the answer to maintaining some form of sanity, is in your filing system.

Here’s why you need at least a basic filing system:

1. Everything works better.

   Every time you spend more than 30 seconds searching for a file, you interrupt your natural flow of work or creativity and stress starts to creep in. It goes without saying what this does to your inspiration and productivity.

2. You’ll restore a sense of control over your work.

   Putting things in order, however small they may be, gives you a nice feeling that you’re totally in control. This will spread onto your work and make you feel more confident in other areas of business also!

3. You’ll learn a valuable design lesson.

   Design is all about putting the right things in the right place, in proper order. In other words, it’s about making sense out of seemingly separate pieces. We use this thinking to design logos, websites and…. our filing systems! Design is about organisation and structure, and far from being only visual.

Believe us when we say we used to run with no system, but now…after years of doing it the wrong way we felt burnt out, tired and overwhelmed with our business so we made a change…and we’re now self-proclaimed business organisation experts with the #1 digital filing system you need! (It changed our lives!)

So…now that you know why you need a filing system, let us break down our system and how we created it.

Here’s an overview of Cohere’s winning filing system:

The structure of our system starts with one main business folder and within it, contains 5 ‘department’ folders which contain everything our business needs and/or uses.

📁 COHERE CREATIVE - Our Main business folder

1. 📁 ADMIN - For storing business documents, information and resources

2. 📁 FINANCE - For storing Invoices, spreadsheets and accounting files

3. 📁 HR - Where we keep contact details & agreements for staff and contractors

4. 📁 MARKETING - For everything marketing related - branding, website, social media, email marketing etc.

5. 📁 PROJECTS - All client project files & templates

Of these department folders the ‘biggest’ by far is our PROJECTS folder and it’ll likely be yours too. This contains over 100,000 files at the time of writing this… eek! - and is ALWAYS growing. Depending on your business however, this folder may look more like PRODUCTS folder or SERVICES.

Our PROJECTS folder contains a folder for each of the clients we have worked with and within that folder, each of the projects and/or jobs we have completed/worked on for them.

How we name our folders & files

When filing anything always use a back-to-front date prefix!

This is year first, month then date (ie. ‘YYMMDD Project Description’) This is because filing is always sorted alphabetically…. but we most often use time as a point of reference for searching for previous projects.

For instance, if we were starting a Logo Design job on the 10th September, 2019 the folder would be simply called ‘190910 Logo’ - it’s already sitting inside the Client Folder so there’s no need to add any more than that because we know who it belongs to already!