Not so long time ago, when a letter needed to be sent, you would have your secretary typing it with one of these noisy typing machines. What I remember very well was 'the register book' used to list the document destination, purpose, and reference. So, every business document was clearly referenced and properly classified.

Today, as emails and computers are available at everyone desk, it is not a common practice to have your letters typed by a secretary, neither to use a 'register book' nor document referencing. With the new era of working (almost) paperless, did we really improved efficiency and data protection? How often you were looking for an important business document without being able to find it on your computer? How many time you experienced misunderstanding because lack of document traceability?

How to efficiently manage your business documents?

There are numerous business document management software packages that provide powerful paperless office solutions. If you have the possibility, you should definitely go for it.The technique described here does not require any application or software, and provides a quite good solution for your business document management.

How to create your business document reference?

The document reference needs to be of course unique but also be readable. Your reference will be even more beneficial if it provides you with information about the content of the document. When defining your reference convention, you should not only have an incremental counter, but additional information that will help you to remember the purpose of your documents.

I am using a referencing system mainly for my business quotations that I send to my customers. I use a format like [my 2 initials][counter for unique number][date of document][3 first letter of my customer name].

I use my initials as my team mates also use this same reference convention. It enables to easily understand which one of us issued a particular quotation.

Using your document reference as you file naming convention.

Your will place your reference within the content of a business document. But I recommend that you use the reference as your file name. You may add a few words (up to 4 words) in addition to reference in order to increase readability. For example, c:JD483-30.11.07-TUS LCD Samsung 42 inch.doc'. JD are my initials, 483 is the document counter, 30.11.07 is the document date of issue, TUS are the 3 first letters of TUSHINGHAM, my customer name, and Samsung 42 inch is the subject of my quotation.

What are the benefits of using references for your business documents? Referenced document will avoid many errors and ease traceability. If your customers are referring your document reference in their correspondence, the chances for errors or misunderstanding are lower.

Having a standard file naming convention will help you also to find information quickly, using any search tool such as Google Desktop or the search feature in Windows. Referring to our example above, if you want to find all documents send to your customer TUSHINGHAM, just type -TUS in your search application. Want to list all documents sent on 30.11.07? Just type -30.11.07- in your search application and you get the whole list.

How to generate automatic references for your business documents

In order to be quicker with you references, you may want to use one of the many free applications for business document management . You will get the electronic web-based version of the good old 'register book'.