record-keeping systems

Lawyers, accountants and their filing systems

Recently I was talking to my lawyer about governance in my business. For a good chunk of the hour I was with him he explained the filing system he uses in his law firm. That had nothing to do with the reason for my visit but I guess I have to live with the fact that I’ll get charged for that time!!!

I have noticed over my time that lawyers and law firms have pretty good systems for keeping a record of their work. I suspect that a lot of it is to do with the teams of secretaries they have. These people- mostly women – must be angels as far as their bosses are concerned.

The bigger firms were early adopters of electronic management systems. In my experience the legal profession in general keeps a good record of their business activities no matter what system they choose to use.

I assumed accountants were the same. Maybe they are. But I saw one accountant’s office recently that made me shudder. There was paper everywhere. All in piles admittedly but there were so many piles. There was simply no spare space except a few spots on the floor.

This man was quite happy with his “system”. However no-one else in his office knew how or where to find anything. One of his staff admitted that it could take her 2-3 hours to find a client file when Ken was away recently. She was quite concerned. But Ken didn’t see a problem.

I left his office feeling pleased that he wasn’t my accountant.

Good recordkeeping enables your business to operate after a disaster

At the hearing into the collapse of the CTV building following the Christchurch earthquake in February 2011, a structural engineer said that he was unable to present his company’s records of a CTV fitout.  He said the records were lost after his former offices in a Victoria St building was severely damaged in the quake and later demolished.

This is a classic example of poor recordkeeping and shows how a lack of planning for continuing in business following a disaster can impact on a business.  Would you feel confident about using this particular engineering company after hearing this statement?

A disaster doesn’t have to be as major as the Christchurch earthquakes.  It could be a flood following a superabundance of rain or a fire that is restricted to a particular building or even a failure in your own office computer(s).

Planning to recover from a disaster so you can continue to operate your business is not often high on the list of priorities for businesses.  But this instance about records relating to the CTV building is a good indication of why it is so important to have a recordkeeping system that includes a good backup system.

In the ‘good old days’ before computers and when the only business records were paper records,  letters, reports, meeting minutes etc were typed up in duplicate, sometimes triplicate.  This meant there was always a backup copy (though unfortunately records were still lost from time to time in situations where all the multiple copies were held in the same office).

Today’s equivalent is a paper copy and an electronic copy or two electronic copies each stored in a different place.

There are a number of options to consider for backup electronic storage. You can use CDs, USB sticks, portable hard drives or virtual storage in the ‘cloud’ such as Google Docs, Dropbox.

It doesn’t matter what backup storage system you decide to use, the key thing is that you must actually use it – and regularly.

You don’t have to keep everything – you just need to think about what business information you would need to continue to operate in the event of a disaster of some form hitting your business.

Decide on a backup policy for your vital business information and make sure the policy is followed!

Do this before you get caught out by a flood, fire or earthquake – or even a hard drive failure on your computer.