The concept of the paperless office is real. And with today's technology makes it cheaper and easier to reach even a small home office. To keep your success "paperless office", it is important for you to establish a simple naming convention for all your electronic documents. If you follow a well-defined naming convention, it is easier to find documents, use again and again and stay paperless office.
A naming convention is simply a well-structuredStandards that are defined for electronic documents. You can keep it simple and logical way so that you and anyone else who accesses documents easy to understand and follow your naming guidelines.
For example, a simple and logical naming convention for the bills at home:
[Date]. [Company]. [Type]. Pdf
With this convention, you can share your captured "bill" statements have the following filenames:
2010_01_01.ComEd.bill.pdf
2010_01_15.Verizon.bill.pdf
2009_12_15.Verizon.contract.pdf
Immediately, just from looking at these file names, you can tell that these documents are your electric utility bills and cell phone bills. You also can instantly identify the dates for each bill statement. In the last example, you can quickly see that this is your "contract" agreement with your cell phone service.
This is just one simple example of a naming convention. When defining your own naming standards, consider a structure that will best support the way you think and organize your office.
And do not stress about getting your naming structure perfect in the beginning. The nice thing about a paperless office, having all your documents as electronic (soft-copy) files on your computer, is you can easily change your naming standards and tree folder structure in the future.
I strongly suggest to use "dates" in the first part of your file names, and format them as [YYYY_MM_DD]. Use the full [four-digit year], then the [two-digit month] and then the [two-digit day]. By following this specific format for dates in the front of all your filenames, you then have the flexibility to sort your files by "name", allowing you another way to quickly locate your documents within each folder chronologically.
As you continue to develop and maintain your paperless office, following your simple naming convention, along with a logical and well-defined "folder structure" will go a long way to keeping your electronic documents organized and efficient.
