Organize Your Client Files

When you’re a Virtual Assistant, you might have thousands of client documents, spreadsheets, and images on your computer – all of which you need to keep organized. Whether you’re just starting out or have been in business for a while, it’s important to have a system so that you can quickly put your fingers on these important files as needed.

In this episode of The RocketGirl Show, I'll share some tips for digital file organization.

TRANSCRIPT 

Hey everybody, I'm Belinda Wasser, also known as RocketGirl. Today, we're going to talk about how to organize your client files.

Welcome to The RocketGirl Show. As a Virtual Assistant, it is critical to be able to put your hands on your clients' files quickly. It's not billable when you're struggling to find an attachment or find a file or get some critical information that either you or your client needs to do the project. So you want to make sure that you're organized from the start so that you can impress your clients and stream on your work by putting your hands on documents quickly.

Let's talk about how to do that. All right. The first thing is I want you to pick a place where you're going to keep all your client documents. It could be Dropbox. It could be One Drive. It could be Google Docs but wherever it is, I want you to find one place to keep them. In that place, create a folder called “Clients” and all of your client work is going to go in there, now, not all together and in a big jumble.

But the next step is that you're going to use subfolders. The subfolder will be your client's name you want to keep the same naming convention no matter what. So, if you decide it's going to be a company name that's fine or the client's name.  In my case, I work with a lot of solo professionals. So, I think about them more in terms of their name versus their company name. But, either way, is fine just be consistent.

Then, inside you're going to want to organize the files in subfolders. So, let's say I have client file Joe Smith and then inside that, I'll have another folder for his headshots, his logos, presentations and then even deeper if I have a lot of presentations for a client in the presentation folder, I might organize it by date or by client name. His client name whatever makes the most sense for me to be able to find the files. The key here is also to use meaningful file names. So, you want to make sure that especially if edits are flying back and forth with the presentation or even with headshots that you know, you date them or you have the date in the file name. I have a few clients that update their headshots every year and so, I want to make sure that I know which year these headshots are for, going backward.

You also want to create at that same level as the client folder, a client archive. So that way when a client leaves, you just drag their folder right in the archive. Just so it's out of the way, you're not tripping over it. I keep my client archive files for a long time because clients do come back and I want to make sure that I can you know be ready to roll, you know at the moment that they're ready to get started on the project again but I don't want to be tripping over it all the time.

The key here is to be consistent so let me tell you a couple of benefits of that one is that you'll always know where to find things but a bigger thing for me is that I don't have to remember where I put something because if I have a system I know where it is. If I put my keys in the basket by the front door and someone says where are your keys and I'm consistent I'll say in the basket by the front door. If someone says where's my presentation from 2019, I know where it is. It's in their client folder in the presentation folder with a date attached to the presentation so I can find it.

So you can see how important that is to really keep things organized. You'll help your clients. It'll impress your clients and it will really help you make all of your time billables and not be wasting it. So if you have a big mess right now what I suggest you do is create that client folder, create a folder for each client, and then as you have new information pull it over or you use information that you already have in your kind of your mess. I put the mess all in one folder. You can pull from there. So that way you're not spending a lot of time that could be billable trying to make a system that is a mess, perfect, you're just going forward with a clean slate and you can always go back into your other folder and find things just the way you were before but moving forward you fixed the issue.

So, before we leave today, I just want to take a minute and I want to tell you about my free online classroom. It is on Facebook. And to find it you type The Virtual Assistant Connection. We have over 6 500, we're going to hit 6500 members probably tomorrow which is very exciting and the virtual assistant connection is committed to educating and connecting Virtual Assistants, all over the world we're represented in over 47 countries. And it's a very exciting, nurturing place to be whether you're just thinking about being a Virtual Assistant or you've been one for a while. So, i hope you'll join me over there. I'd love to welcome you.

So, my name is Belinda Wasser, RocketGirl signing off until next time, bye.