Organizing with folders

Folders are the firm’s filing cabinet. Documents can exist without one, but a portal where nothing is filed becomes a search box with a thousand results in it by the middle of the season.

Folders are for your staff, not for clients

Worth establishing before anything else, because it is the thing firms most often get wrong here:

• Clients cannot reach the Folders screen. It is not in their sidebar.
• Putting a document in a folder does not give anybody access to it. Access comes from assignment alone — see Who can see a document.

So a folder named after a client is good practice for whoever does your filing, and completely invisible to that client.

Create a folder

1. Open Folders and press Create Folder.
2. Name it. Names are what you will scan down a list looking for, so keep them short and consistent — the client’s name, the year, the engagement.
3. Choose a parent folder, or leave it at the top level.
4. Press Create.

Folders nest, so a folder created inside another becomes a subfolder of it.

A structure that holds up

The structure that survives a busy season is usually the shallowest one that still answers “whose is this?” in one glance. Two patterns that work:

• By client, then by year — best when most of your work is recurring for the same people.
• By year, then by client — best when you archive a whole year at a time.

Pick one and use it for everything. A tree where half the firm files by client and half by year is worse than either.

The Shared and Private markers

Each folder shows a marker: a lock for private, or a people icon for shared, and the list can be filtered by either.

These are a status you can read, not a control you set. Folders are created private, and the product has no screen for choosing who a folder is shared with or at what level. If every folder in your list shows a lock, nothing is wrong — that is the normal state.

Finding things

The Folders screen filters by document type and status, so you can ask “what is still pending in this client’s folder?” without leaving it. Documents can be moved between folders from the document’s own row. See Finding a document again.

Deleting a folder

Look inside first — what you are looking at is a name, not the twenty documents behind it, and deletion here is permanent. See Deleting documents and folders.