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Record keeping might feel onerous but with a savvy approach, writes Francis Wilkins, you can transform it from a chore to the foundation stone of business success
Good record keeping is a powerful tool.
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How so? After all, a broker for whom establishing and maintaining relationships with clients is second nature; who has an enviable knowledge of lenders and products; and who knows what it takes to get an application across the line is always going to be successful, aren’t they?
No, not unless their skills and experience are underpinned by efficient administration, including effective record keeping.
If you know you have all the above, but for some reason you aren’t getting the results you want, could it be your admin operations need beefing up?
Efficient record keeping simply allows you to leverage your resources efficiently, to fulfil your regulatory obligations with the minimum amount of pain and, of course, to maximise your profit.
That’s why it’s a powerful business tool.
Stay in sync
Chances are, you gather and store information in several different ways. You might take an iPad to a client meeting, collect a credit card receipt when you fill up with petrol, add an address to your phone and then, when you get back to the office, you need to update some files on your PC.
While this gives you flexibility – particularly by having mobile options – you need to ensure your records remain up to date with one another. For example, sync your phone regularly; if you need to transfer data from an iPad manually, make sure you do it as soon as possible while the information is still fresh in your mind.
If you have paper records – such as that petrol receipt – which need to be logged, do it immediately then ditch the paper (unless you are required to keep it, in which case you should file it immediately).
Non-administrative paperwork, such as the notes you took at a client fact find, takes on greater significance once you put it online. Those rough notes aren’t much use if they just sit in a paper file; added to your database, they increase the cohort of clients you’ll be contacting periodically, some of whom will end up being ‘clients for life’.
The ‘paperless’ myth
Unfortunately, you can’t (yet) file and manipulate all your records in electronic form. For legal and tax reasons, you need to hang onto the hard copy versions of some documents (although you could, of course, scan them for your convenience and keep the paper version filed away safely until needed).
What you can do to ensure handling paper takes up the minimum amount of time is to find out exactly which documents you have to keep – the ATO is one body that can help with this – and then to have a rigorous filing system from which you never deviate to store these and any other hard copies you need to save.
It’s also worth noting, that just because something is stored online doesn’t necessarily mean it’s well organised. You can still have randomly created folders, misplaced files and duplicate documents on your computer – the only difference is they won’t be spilling off your desk and onto the floor.
If anything, badly organised online storage is an even greater liability because it’s harder to track down lost files and not difficult to delete ones by mistake when you’re ‘tidying up’.
Tips for tax time
Tax time is when you find out whether your record keeping is really up to scratch.
If you know which records you are required to keep, whether they can be in paper or electronic form, and if you can find them quickly and easily, then chances are the rest of your business is benefitting from your effective and efficient organisation.
