Whether you have a home office, a professional or medical practice, or a small business, it can be helpful to have a professional’s help to get or stay organized in your business. I offer efficient, cost-effective services customized for your individual situation, and scaled to organizing home offices as well as larger offices with employees. I’m familiar with the needs of freelance professionals and the special characteristics and HIPAA privacy requirements of medical and psychology offices.

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Home Office Organization

Organizing a home office is about fitting a lot of business functions in a tight space, while maintaining a clean, serene, uncluttered, pleasant place to work. It requires close attention to detail, from desktop organization to organized shelving, storage and filing, down to the wiring under your desk and furniture. Since decluttering your workspace often involves clearing out personal items, the work often extends to the rest of your home, finding a place for these displaced items. To help you avoid getting buried again, I provide office organization tips, paying attention to habits that make you more efficient.

Analyzing your Office Organization

People are more productive in an organized office. I’ll analyze your office from an organizational perspective: what kind of paperwork flows through your office, how much, and what are its requirements? What files need to be kept, on paper and electronically, and what use do you make of them in your daily business processes? What supplies and equipment do you use daily, or only occasionally, and what kinds of storage spaces and options are available? Is there an opportunity to eliminate off-site storage? An individualized solution includes:

• cleaning out your files and improving your filing systems
• organizing electronic files on your office systems
• identifying and disposing of surplus supplies and equipment
• reorganizing your storage and office spaces for maximum value
• decluttering public and waiting areas

 Organized Supplies and Materials

When it comes to supplies, materials, equipment and inventory, organization is money in your pocket. For service and professional offices, it means an end to over-ordering and losses due to expiration. For goods-based businesses, it means streamlining operations and better use of capital. In either case, the key is finding a place and a home for everything, in spaces and locations that make sense for the business. Critical items must be clearly and highly visible, so that they can be found efficiently and don’t get lost or duplicated.

After creating a master plan for storing all the items in your business, I coordinate with your staff to to clear out items that are no longer useful and organize everything else in your existing spaces. If need be, I research, order, and coordinate installation of shelving, cabinetry, and containers according to the plan. At the same time, I work with you and your staff on habits and procedures for staying organized: for taking inventory, determining reorder points. ordering efficiently, and returning items to their places.

Organized Paperwork

When it comes to paperwork (and that means electronic paperwork, too), my advice is usually: do less, keep less. This involves a concentration on filing and business procedures as well as on organized file storage. Starting out, I work with you to dispose of accumulated clutter in the files, identifying critical business records that must be maintained and the requirements for maintaining them. For electronic files, I help you identify what needs to be kept and to establish organizational approaches that enhance the searchability of these files.

Having decluttered your files, I next establish an organizational system that optimizes efficiency and makes best use of the storage and filing spaces and furniture that you have. If needed, I research, and coordinate installation of additional file storage. Often, though, I find opportunities to reduce the need for file storage, improving your business by repurposing that space to better uses, or eliminating costs for off-site storage.

Just as important, I provide coaching and time management for your staff to help them maintain and improve efficiency with the new organizational system. In particular, I work with them to establish special, priority procedures for handling critical business records and for administering critical business functions such as billing and claims, that have a direct impact on revenues and payments. Catching up on backlogs in these areas produces a large payoff

Organized Customer and Patient Areas

Your waiting room or front office is how your customers see you. The impression is not a good one if you have printer paper stored under the tables, untidy piles of magazines, and chairs and furniture crowded together. Organizing storage and filing presents an opportunity to present a cleaner, more appealing public image. Freeing up back-office space gives you the opportunity to create a more spacious place for customers, and better storage and filing arrangements provide more efficient spaces for handling patient and business records that are not visible to the general public. It is great preparation for more design-oriented solutions such as new paint and better lighting.