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It’s time to get your home office spic and span for the New Year

If you have a home office, whether in a room of its own or a corner of the dining room, you are probably short of storage space. Are your file drawers overflowing and your computer hard drives overloaded?

If so, here are some housekeeping tips that may help the situation, whether you run a business from home or simply use your office there to keep track of family finances and activities.

Decide what’s expendable
If your files are stuffed with paper, perhaps they need a good weeding. Since many of them contain confidential financial information, you might feel more comfortable if you shred the documents before putting them in the trash. A “personal” shredder that fits on top of a standard oblong wastebasket costs less than $50, including a supply of plastic bags to catch the shredded paper.

You might want to begin with those statements from the firms that handle your investments. Discuss with your accountant how much history you want to keep, retain the year-end summaries for the rest, and turn on the shredder.

Go through the same process with your other files – for instance, routine bills for which your cancelled check provides a receipt, insurance policies that are cancelled when you receive an updated one every year, statements of your various charge/credit card rewards programs. Wherever the most recent statement supersedes the last one, you should check it carefully against your own knowledge, and discard the older document.

Rent a safe deposit box
During your examination of old papers, you may come across things of lasting value. Savings bonds, stock certificates, the deeds for your house or title for the family car – all of these things can be replaced, but the process is onerous. Instead, after carefully listing the items (with identifying numbers and other vital details) in a notebook that can be kept current, find a local bank that has a small safe deposit box available for rent. The modest annual fee will buy you a lot of peace of mind.

Straighten up your computer
The hard drive of your computer may look like the phone book for an unknown city. It’s time to take a hard look at what you’ve saved, especially if you have multiple drafts of some documents. You should retain only the final draft of each.

This is a tedious task, but it can be done if you block out some time to accomplish it. By creating sub-directories for what is left after you have trashed irrelevant documents, you will learn the basics of computer file storing that will help you prevent such a confusing mess in the future.

Documents that represent projects completed in 2001 are archival and can be eliminated from the hard drive and stored on a large-capacity zip drive disk. Take a minute to record the date and items saved to the zip disk in the directory inside the disk’s container.

Obviously, backing up data should be a good habit of yours, in order to prevent the wholesale destruction that could happen if you experience a crash or unexpected power outage.

More information
Additional tips on office organization and other subjects of interest to small business owners are available online from American Express.

December 20, 2001

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