A big part of running a business is staying on top of all the paperwork. Behind each document you have to deal with, there’s often a whole range of other related concerns, and how you manage that process can have a huge impact on a range of important issues.
It’s important to develop and implement some sort of system early on, to prevent any kind of disorganised backlog from building up. If 2025 is the year that you decide to take this seriously, then these are a few important things that you’ll need to consider.
Breaking it down
To get your business documentation in order, you need to be able to break it down into different categories. Failure to do this will just leave you with an unorganised and organisable pile of papers and PDFs that just continues to grow.
Safety documentation
One important category you’ll need to get on top of is your safety documentation. This can include anything from your Water Safety Plan to fire risk assessments, and it’s important to note that a lot of these documents will be quite different.
Still, they can generally be kept and organised in the same general category. Doing so not only makes these kinds of documents more practically effective, but also makes it easier to prove regulatory compliance to any relevant authorities.
Accounts
It’s also incredibly important that you keep your accounts all together in a single, organised space. Failure to do so is a recipe for disaster, and can result in anything from late fees and missed payments, to unnecessarily complicated and lengthy due diligence processes in the event that you decide to sell your business.
Legal documents
While all of your documents will have a legal component, you’ll also want to create a category for more specifically legal papers. These could include things like contracts, the deeds to your premises, and privacy policies. It’s vital that you’re able to access these documents as quickly as possible at the drop of a hat, and to do so requires taking an organised approach.
Implementing a document management system
Once you have a better understanding of what kind of documents you’re actually dealing with, you can implement some kind of document management system. The system you implement should include a range of different functions, from access control and backup capabilities, to workflow integration for documents that require ongoing amendment.
Whatever kind of system you choose to go with, you need to make sure that all your employees are fully trained on how to use it. If even just a few people fail to adopt your new solution, it could lead to compliance nightmares, with regulatory documents being even more difficult to track than before.
It’s important to start this process as soon as possible. Once you’ve implemented a management system, things will flow incredibly easily, and the earlier you get started, the easier it’ll be to make sure that you don’t have a steadily growing backlog of data that then needs to be processed and integrated at a later date.