Welcome to the Virtual Cabinet filing structure article.

This article has been created to supplement the Virtual Cabinet Welcome Pack. It contains information relating to the Virtual Cabinet filing structure and is intended for audiences who are about to implement Virtual Cabinet. As a result this article is not exhaustive, and is not intended to be a replacement for the Virtual Cabinet Admin Guide. The topics covered will allow you to prepare for your upcoming Virtual Cabinet implementation.

Whether you are moving from Traditional Filing Cabinets; a windows folder structure on a network drive; or an Alternative Document Management system, implementing Virtual Cabinet will give you the opportunity to review your existing filing structure. This can be a daunting task.

The great news is, we are on our way. Our implementation team will soon be with you and can guide you on the best practices in line with your requirements.

We want you to be aware of some of the business decisions you will need to make during your consultancy session with our team.

Your welcome pack contains many example filing structures covering a multitude of industries. We will take one of these as an example for this article and explain how the example structure translates to Virtual Cabinet. The aim of this is to get you thinking about your filing structure before we arrive so you can get ….. Ahead of the game!

What is the Virtual Cabinet filing structure?

There is a folder structure in Virtual Cabinet but we tend not to use it for most requirements.

Why is that?

Well, we have designed Virtual Cabinet so you don’t need one! The problem with folder structure is just that! … It’s a structure! Its set in stone and making changes to it can be troublesome. You also have to dig into it to find out what’s there, often finding yourself several folder levels deep and what you were looking for isn’t there at all!

Solution

We have designed a filing structure that allows you search for files from every angle and view the results how you want to see them!

The Virtual Cabinet filing structure is all about classifying and labelling your documents and files appropriately. These classifications in Virtual Cabinet are known as File Sections and Indexes.

These not only allow you to search for documents but they also allow you to structure your search results in line with your use case e.g.

I want to search for all documents within the last year, relating to a client and I want to see them grouped by document type (e.g email, letter, invoice, purchase order etc). 

With this scenario the filing structure must contain the client name and document date to search on and the document type to group the results by when they come back! So you should think about how you may want to search for documents and groupings that you may want to apply to them.

This is the beauty of Virtual Cabinet and the reason we don’t use folder structures! Your user’s can see the results in whatever grouping or hierarchy they want! (As long as it’s included in the Sections or Indexes!)

Example Structure

Your Welcome Pack contains example filing structures from a broad range of industries and they are a great starting point when considering your filing structure. Many businesses have been through this process before and the example filing structures have been designed by our experienced consultants.

Let’s run with an example; we will choose the accountancy industry and the client’s filing cabinet. These cabinets are often the more complicated requirements; other industries can still apply the same logic. Other filing cabinets that you may also want to consider are HR, Research, and Document Library; again there are examples of these in your Welcome Pack.

Ok let’s take the example structure and discuss how it looks and feels in VC.

Firstly we have to decide how we want our client files to be broken down. What are the common File Sections? We usually setup appropriate sections based on your industry. In this example we usually setup the following work types:

• Audit & Accounts
• Fees
• Duty
• Company Secretarial
• Correspondence
• Permanent
• Payroll
• Tax
• VAT

Then we decide on the indexes we need for each one of these sections. In our example we are going to concentrate on the Tax section. Below is an excerpt from the example Accountancy – Clients filing structure.

We are going to make sure we have the following indexes:

• Client Code and Name
• Description - a description for the document
• Document Date - an optional document date

The above would be the same for all of the sections, but as we are in the Tax section we can now add some bonus tax related indexes:

• Tax Year – Tax year in desired format e.g. 2014/15
• Tax Document Type – type of tax document e.g. Penalty Notice, 64-8, Tax Return, Tax Computation, Working Papers etc

So what this will do?

Well, it will present your users (as they are filing a tax document) with five indexes to complete in the filing wizard. With the bonus tax indexes; they will have the ability to pick a tax year and document type that is pertinent to the document they are filing. These can also be configured as predefined lists that our users can pick and choose from;

… just to keep the choices common across the system and reduce user error.

It’s also worth noting that the order of the indexes can be customised and indexes can be made mandatory. In this case we may want to make all indexes mandatory apart from the description and document date.

Let’s see it in action!

This section will show how the above structure translates to Virtual Cabinet. Again we will use the Accountancy Tax example as the previous section.

In Virtual Cabinet here we have our intray with a document we want to file selected and previewed.

Let’s look at the indexing pane in more detail.

Now you will see that we have a list of filing cabinets to choose from. Let’s keep to our example and choose the clients filing cabinet.

Once a Filing Cabinet has been chosen:

Then you pick from the list of sections that we defined. We will choose Tax:

Then we are presented with a list of document types that we have chosen to present to the users (order is customisable).

We then fill in the rest of the indexes that are presented to us and file the document away.

What we need from you:

Take a look at our sample filing structures, take copies of them and play about with them before we arrive onsite. Remember you don’t have to decide or finalise your structure before we arrive! That’s what we are coming to help you with… This is just to give you a head start on your business decisions and provide you with some best practices and common configurations used by your industry peers.

A word of warning:

Try not to fall into the trap of thinking you need lots and lots of labels/indexes. The more fields you configure, the more of a hurdle there can be to people putting documents into the system. Virtual Cabinet searching is very powerful so you really don’t need much information to get to what you need. If you are not sure whether it’s needed, it’s probably not. You can always add to the filing structure later – try not to give your staff unnecessary work to do from day one.