Best Practices in Document Management for School Administrators

As a school administrator, you want to keep school records organized, easy to find, and safe. The growing volume of paperwork is not making it easy. If you have been searching for effective approaches to managing documents and tone down their complexity. Using a web-native, cloud-based platform, that is user-friendly and can centralize all your files in one place, might help. Making it easy for you and your staff to find, share, and update essential records without confusion.

When you’re storing information, documents, or any other valuable content, it’s because you want to use it later. To use something, you need to have timely access to it. However, if your storage is poorly organized, accessing this information can become difficult. Considering how fast we work today, you’re likely creating and storing information in various formats. You are storing this information across different locations, according to the platforms and mediums you use. And the speed at which this happens leaves little time to properly organize everything. By following best practices for document management, you create a smooth and reliable process of handling documents.

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Best practices are simple rules or methods that most people agree are the best way to do something. You use them because they work. These practices are made by learning from what works the best and helps you in getting good, reliable results. By following best practices, you can avoid problems and make improvements where you want to.

Best Practice: The simplest way to get results which can be repeated.

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Before you start creating documents, it’s a good idea to plan how you will organize them. Organization helps at the time of storage, as you know what will go where. Which in turns makes the retrieval easy, because you know how the system behind storage works.

Best way to start is by thinking on how you want to group your documents. You can organize them into folders based on what they are: reports, forms or employee records. Use simple, clear names for your files so you can easily tell what they are without opening each one.

Also, think about who needs to see each document. You can set permissions to keep certain documents private while letting others access the ones they need.

You plan to make sure everything stays in order as your files grow. It also helps you find things faster and avoid problems with different versions of documents. When your system is organized from the start, it saves time and keep everything simple to manage later on.

Once you have created a storage structure, choose a web-native and no-code platform to store all your documents in one central location. This will make access to everyone a core feature. And you can share the latest version without confusion. Why? By storing all your documents in one central location, you are not scattering them everywhere. One place for everyone to access, annotate and share from. So, if you have made important improvements to a document or edited a document according to current conditions, you don’t have to update everyone involved in the project of the change and keep on sharing the files after every change. Everything happens in one place. No matter how many times it happens.

So, your storage issue is set, what next? You want to create some rules for naming the files. Wait, what is a file here?
File is a digital container. It’s like a box that holds information or content. This content is decided by you and your requirements, be a video recording of a function in .mp4 format or a recently submitted form saved as a .pdf document.

You will have to name them according to a certain pre-defined format and a naming system. If you are setting the Employee Name as the root folder, you might want to name it in this way “employeename_yyyy_designation”. Make it another way around, you want to keep structure your folders according to the departments, ” departmentname_designation_YYYY_Name”. Let’s move towards to structure to make it make sense.

You will also have to create a map of all the paths, that will help you navigate the storing and searching for all your files.
Storing around 1000 files in one folder, is not a great plan to have. Why?

Because you will have difficulty finding older files whose names you have forgotten and only remember their contents. And if your system is old, it will struggle loading the files fasters. Any file beyond a certain size limit will pose a the problem loading for the entire folder. Sometimes, it is harder to catch the deletion trail of files too, if you are keeping them altogether. Imagine this with a volume of a school, you are inviting trouble.

Have an Index in mind, and build your structure from there. Here is an option.

Mostly, the above three points are enough till a certain level or volume of work. But when you want you want to implement a solution you want to start thinking a few steps ahead.

How does one do that? Know what you want to do with the information in the documents, what we will call goals. Do you want to create parents portal to easily share their children’s reports? Or are you trying to make the digitize employee records for ease of search? And secondly have certain measurements and checks in place to keep the work going, understanding what needs improvement and where the mistakes are happening or issues are cropping up. This is usually called Key Performance Indicators. Like how long do you want the access to last? And how to securely share a form for signature.

Humans make Mistakes

Systems have Issues

If you want to send an email to all the parents about upcoming events, it becomes tedious to send it one by one. Worse, what if there are attachments involved? Batching emailing, secure documents that need to be verified later is an important task too. Simple work, but ends up taking attention on the wrong things.

So you chart these processes and automate them. Remember the maps you had to make? They can also help in creating powerful automations that will reduce time and effort for the administrators.

The method of outsourcing, repetitive tasks that mimics human actions, to robots, is called Robotic Process Automation

You can use the digital systems to advantage by knowing the rules you use.
How? A software works on the base of conditions, so if the rules you use are clear: you can apply them directly to the automation.

You can create a system where attendance records are updated based on the inputs from teachers or student check-ins. You can schedule reminders, even make them periodic, for upcoming events, deadlines, or important announcements.

There are going to be places where you don’t really need to follow the old procedures. It is for you to decide, if the checks made in paper based workflow solutions are necessary in digital ones too.

Always choose the tools you can use, consistently. The best way on deciding about which solution you want apply is to make sure they fulfill certain predefined criteria. According to your needs.

First, they should provide training for their tools or software. You are going to use this for a considerable amount of time and get work done. What they had in mind while making it necessary to know. Do you find it comfortable to use once you are trained? Does it feel intuitive once the basic principles are cleared up? Is there a dependable and accessible customer support for the times when things go wrong.

Choose according to your budget, definitely. But keep in mind the use-case first. Not using what you pay for is money wasted in indirect way.

Their version of how the solutions works and the outcome you want should be aligned.

Why choosing a cloud based centralized storage is a good practice for document management? Firstly, your access is not limited by geographical location, until you decide to. Secondly, you get to offload the entire management of digital infrastructure to a dependable service. Is digital storage expensive? Well, digital space can become expensive over time, when it comes to storing large volumes of data. There is an added complexity of being compliant with industry regulations. So, using external servers which are being managed by corporation is the current market solution. They are renting out the space on subscription basis to create an option of flexible access. They are also taking care of a huge share of development cost, security, integrations and maintenance.

When you choose a cloud based service, you will have a shared responsibility in keeping access on your side, secure. If you own a laptop or any electronic communicating device, you might be following those rules already.

Docupile is a web-based, cloud-storage, intuitively designed document management system. If you are on a lookout for a dependable, customizable and upgradable option, try us out for a free trial. Want to know us and then make a choice? Contact us for a coffee time demo.

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