Two years ago I got the fight of my life after it was announced that my business would undergo a tax audit. The reason why I was scared was not because we hadn’t paid taxes or because we were dodging the system, we were in fact doing everything by the book, but because our office was an absolute mess. We had files all over the place, we had stuff on computer and other staff in paper format and quite simply we looked like a right state.
Somehow we managed to scrape through that audit, but it served as a lesson for us to be more organized in the future. We have changed the way in which we do things now, and we have found that it came with many more benefits. If you have a business which isn’t very organized, here is why you should change.
Tax Audit
I’ll start with the obvious reason and that is a tax audit, although any audit can be helped by a better organizational system. The reason why this is so important is because any auditors coming in from outside are going to need certain pieces of information quickly to hand, if you are not able to do this because you are too busy swimming through a sea of paperwork then you are going to be unlikely to be looked upon kindly by the auditor, and they will think that if you can’t keep paperwork up to date then what does that say about your ability to run a business, or pay your taxes.
Speed of Operations
Something which has greatly improved since the big clean-up which we did was to massively speed up our operations. There are so many moments in the business where we need to get a customer’s records or cite information from previous deals and in the past we would have spent a huge amount of time each and every day searching through the mountain of paperwork in order to find it. Now that we have a perfect system which is all filed in alphabetical and chronological order, everting is easier to find and as a result we have saved a huge number of man hours which we’d have previous used on searching.
Morale
As the business owner I really should have paid more attention to how our dgsorgnziaed business was impacting the morale of the staff. They never said much about it because it just became the norm, but they have all since spoken to me about how much they would hate having to dig through the files and how happier they are since we have changed it. This change has greatly increased the levels of happiness in the office and I would say that now morale is very evidently in a good place.
If you have been putting off that organization then don’t any longer, pick a day and get it done.