Revamp your files and filing system

How to organize home office files

In a typical home office, you might find an assortment of expense receipts, tax documents, bank and investment statements, invoices, paid bills, and outstanding expenses. These might be scattered across years, clients, and they might even be scattered across different rooms in your home office, or from your home to your workplace.

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Find out what your organizational priorities are. Is it more important for you to access these files by year, by client, or by paid and unpaid invoices? What makes sense to your productivity or your industry? Prioritizing your own needs will go a long way toward the end goal of organizing home office files: finding what you need easily and efficiently.

The importance of the printed page

While digital file sharing has advanced by leaps and bounds, sharing a physical copy of your most important files is still a common way to submit paperwork in many situations. Not everyone has access to a scanner, or the ability to file documents electronically. Many government and financial entities, for example, still rely on paper processing.

Secure your supplies

Before you embark on a total organization of your paper files, it helps to have the following supplies on hand:

• A filing cabinet
• Bankers boxes
• Manilla folders
• Label stickers
• Permanent markers

You might not have the room to fit a filing cabinet into your home office space. Fortunately, there are other options that perform the same tasks but take up less space: expanding file folders, file baskets, and binders are available at any office supply store.

Prioritize by importance

Once you’ve figured out how to organize your files, look at what might need to be sent out, or what might need to be used for this year’s taxes. These are the most important pieces of paperwork that will need to be easily accessed when the time comes.

Emphasize labeling

You won’t need a label printer or a typed form to organize your file folders. Simply handwriting with a permanent marker goes a long way to keeping your information sorted. If you can still read what you have contained in your folders, you’ll be in a good place to organize your home office—after all, your handwriting doesn’t need to be perfect as long as you can make it out.

Shred unnecessary files

Chances are that your files will have sensitive information pertaining to finances, addresses, business partners, clients, or passwords. Shredding these files will go a long way to protecting your data.

Professional shredding services exist at many office supply or shipping locations. However, if you regularly need to dispose of sensitive documents, it’s worth investing in a home shredder so you can protect your personal information and recycle paper.

Consider subfolders

Sometimes your files will have different categories or subsections, like a file tree on a computer. Consider what subsections your main categories will need, such as Leasing, Rent, and Utilities under a folder labeled Property Management. Keep your main folder and your subcategories simple so you won’t waste time creating more files.

Color-code your files and folders to stay organized

If you’re labeling your files, you can also organize them using color. A color code key is a secondary way to organize what files you have, next to your labeling. You can add an extra level of importance to your documents by using different file folder colors. For example, you can use different colored folders to filter by client, date, or project.

Prioritize files by date

Make sure to emphasize upcoming deadlines or invoices when you organize your files. For example, you can put outgoing invoices in their own folder, or organize your overall files by additional characteristics. What needs to go out now? What are you waiting for on a follow-up?

By taking care of what’s urgent, you can better organize your home office, and you can spend more time doing your tasks instead of searching for what you need. For more organizational tips, check out Microsoft 365 to get the most out of working from home.