Wat zit er in een dossier

From Planipedia

Thanks to PlanPlus and WEA for sharing their material for this Best Practices Guide.

When it comes to client files, the best practice principle is to have a documented methodology that you use consistently for all clients for the following:

• Document Collection – What you collect when doing work for a client
• Segmentation, Organization and Storage Location – How you segment your client information into separate files, what’s contained in each file and where each file is stored for each of reference.

Develop Guidelines That Will Work for You: Creating client file guidelines provide uniform standards. While there may be some standards in place within your organization, perhaps for compliance related files, often, other client files become unwieldy and difficult to work with.

While we will illustrate one system that can be used, the key is to decide on a method that will work well for you given the services you provide, your operating style, and organizational structure.

Analyse Your Services and Workflow: One of the first steps in developing guidelines is to look at your operations and determine the degree of segmentation you require in your client files. If you are doing comprehensive planning, you’ll probably benefit from a more segmented method where data is compartmentalized by category and saved in specific files. If your services are more focused in one area, less segmentation is likely required.

Consistency: Once you have developed your guidelines, the payoff will be realized only if you are consistent and use that method for all client files. When you do this, you’ll always be able to easily find documents in your files whenever you want to . . . and quickly.

Make it Office Policy: Once guidelines are developed, ensure that everyone in the office is educated on the process and understands how to implement it. Creating a set of sample files is an efficient way to demonstrate the system visually.

Implement Over Time: If you have been in business for a number of years, you no doubt have accumulated quite a volume of client files. While it would be nice to bring those files up to your new standards overnight, it’s not practical to set such an objective. The simplest approach is to make the transition gradually by taking the time whenever doing a review of any kind for a client and organizing the files to your guidelines. Using this approach you’ll likely get all of your files converted over a 12 – 24 month time period. If you were determined to speed up the process, the other alternative would be to have a target of re-organizing a specific number of files each week, such as 5 or 10. You might also choose the client files to be done based on your “best” clients so that your most active clients are converted sooner rather than later.