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Chapter 10
Filing Best Practices

This chapter covers the best practices that can be used to create a more efficient
filing system for an accounting department. Though this may seem like such an
easy topic that it does not warrant its own chapter, there are actually many steps
that a progressive accounting staff can take to greatly enhance the efficiency of its
filing work.
This chapter does not focus on doing a better job of filing documents. On the
contrary, filing is a totally nonvalue-added activity, so the focus here is on finding
ways to completely avoid filing. This can be done through a variety of approaches,
including an increased use of electronic documents, standard procedures for destroy-
ing old documents, and keeping paper from being used in the first place. All of
these document prevention techniques are designed to keep paper from ever
reaching the filing staff, thereby allowing a company to reduce the clerical work
associated with filing, while also reducing the amount of space needed to store
documents. These major benefits deserve a separate chapter, no matter how minor
the subject matter may at first appear to be.

IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES FOR FILING BEST PRACTICES

This section discusses the relative ease or difficulty of implementation of the
best practices to be covered later in this chapter. Each best practice is noted in
Exhibit 10.1. For each best practice, there are columns that note the cost and
duration of implementation. These are relative measures and will vary consid-
erably depending on the circumstances in each company. In general, the overall
level of implementation is considered to be easiest if they are entirely within
the control of the accounting department, such as for adopting a document-
destruction policy. However, if they involve the cooperation of another depart-
ment, or if they require special computer programming to implement, which is
the case for many of the best practices related to storing data on a computer,
then the implementation is assumed to be much more difficult to complete.
The two most expensive best practices are document imaging and extending
the time period before computer records are purged from primary computer stor-
age. The reason for this assessment is data storage—document imaging requires
extremely large amounts of storage, usually involving a compact disc jukebox
with storage levels in the very high gigabyte range, as does increasing primary

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