OrganizedArticles.com

by Janet Barclay and Jennifer Kubilis

When starting out, it’s not uncommon to personally handle all the work involved with running your business, but if all goes well, you’ll reach a point where it makes more sense to pay someone else to perform some of the administrative functions, so you can devote more time to serving customers and generating more income. In many cases, bookkeeping is the one of the first tasks to be delegated.

Unless you’ve been well trained, a qualified bookkeeper will be able to process your paperwork more efficiently than you and make sure that all income and expenses are recorded appropriately for income tax purposes. Keep in mind, however, that for your bookkeeper to do his or her job accurately, it’s up to you to provide all required information. Since you are likely paying for the service by the hour, it is also in your best interest to make sure that your paperwork is organized in a way that your bookkeeper doesn’t have to spend a lot of time going through it all to figure out what everything is.

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by John Morris

Records management is one of the most important elements of good business management, and there are several instances when you need to destroy your records for the good of your customer and for your own protection.

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by Janet Barclay

If you’ve ever lost data due to equipment malfunction, human error, or some other cause, you may have experienced dizziness, a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, and other panic symptoms.

In business, data loss means at the very least a reduction in productivity, as valuable time must be spent recreating lost files. In some cases, it may create more serious problems, such as a failure to meet client deadlines, leading to a loss of income or potential lawsuit.

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by Janet Barclay, MVA

One of the most common reasons people invite me to their office for an organizing consultation is to help them deal with the piles of paperwork that are encroaching on their workspace.

It is generally understood that part of the problem is the lack of an efficient filing system and by efficient, I mean one that includes making time to file paid bills, completed projects, and so on. The other part of the problem relates to active projects. For some people, designating a desk drawer for these files is a viable solution, but for visual thinkers, and there are a lot of you out there, the immediate reaction to such a suggestion is, If I can’t see it, I’ll forget about it! Sometimes a desktop vertical organizer will work well, especially if it is slanted so you can see all the file labels, but if you have a large number of active projects, or if the files are very thick, it’s not very effective.

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By Figen Genco, BA.

Paper management is one of the biggest problems people face today - when we are supposed to be “paperless”. Statistics indicate that there are nearly 650,000,000 pages printed from computers every day. That’s enough to fill a file drawer 180 miles long! And there are 178.9 billion fax pages sent/received per day; a 1500% increase in only the past 5 years! Where does all this paper go? It ends up on top of your desk, cabinets, windowsills, drawers, kitchen counters, dining room table. And when you will have guests, it goes into paper bags to be hidden under the sink, inside the dryers, and pantries!

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By Camille Carboneau, CFRW/C, CPRW, CEIP, CRW,

Set goals, but set them with deadlines. The first step in getting organized is goal setting. Do you want to organize your home? Your office? Your family? Your time? Write down exactly what you want to do, and assign a deadline for accomplishing that goal. The deadline should be specific like March 30, or July 30.

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By Suzanne McLoone

Post It’s are a great invention, are they not? They come in great colors, different shapes, and they have flags, dividers, tabs, and they even come inside of a highlighter! They also seem to act like gremlins after you get them wet. One of my clients called me one afternoon and she swore that after she came back from lunch her Post It’s had reproduced like bunnies and she was now overran with pink and yellow stickies all over her desk. What else could I do but laugh? I thought back to how many times that has happened to me and how many times I had actually done the very same thing.

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By Olan Butler

Effective appointment calendar software should have the ability to create multiple categories, display a monthly view, create reminders and provide recurrence capability. In this article series I will go in-depth into the above features and show the valuable benefits of each one.

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By Olan Butler

Effective appointment calendar software should have the ability to create multiple categories, display a monthly view, create reminders and provide recurrence capability. In this article series I will go in-depth into the above features and show the valuable benefits of each one. In this article the focus is the monthly view.

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By Olan Butler

Effective appointment calendar software should have the ability to create multiple categories, display a monthly view, create reminders and provide recurrence capability. In this article series I will go in-depth into the above features and show the valuable benefits of each one. In this article the focus is the reminder.

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