Hunt no more: the right file management setup can dramatically cut the time spent looking for documents within a company’s files.
Full-Text Search vs Filename Search
Most systems allow searches of filenames, but don’t allow searches within documents. For example, a document called “meeting-notes-march” would not be found by a search for “budget” even though that’s in the document. Only a system that indexes the content of your documents will allow such searches.
Add Metadata Tags
Attaching a structured set of metadata tags to your files, for example client name, document type and date, will ensure that a search for say “Jones invoice 2024” returns a set of relevant results, such as 1 or 2 files. Of course the tagging needs to follow a set of rules, to ensure consistent retrieval of documents across your team and using the right principles for document management in line with international standards.
Keep Your Folder Structure Shallow
The reality is that if you have to click through six levels of a folder and then search for a file within that, then you will give up searching and end up doing a very poor search for files. In reality you need a very shallow folder hierarchy of 3 levels deep or less.
Use Version Control
People will stop looking for the latest version of a file, when it is always at the top of the list, clearly labelled.
Filter by Date, Type, or Author
Narrowly search through large sets of documents within seconds by utilising filters to slice through results. Utilising filters to search through specific file types, created dates, authors and much more allows for results to be narrowed down to just three when searching for fifty or more documents.
For File Management Software, see //www.watermarktech.co.uk/file-management-software/.
Even small improvements in file management add up and can make a big difference.
