A virtual assistant can create a lot of documents in a single month. One of my clients is a trustee. It’s not uncommon to generate an average of 300 documents monthly for only this one client. Have you ever thought about how many items you create or handle on behalf of each one of your clients monthly? And the storage each requires? You should.
A virtual assistant is responsible to handle and create many digital pieces that support a client in their business. These pieces when completed should be returned to the client for final storage and retention or placed in an online cloud-based storage solution for shared access by the client and virtual assistant. I suspect that in many cases the reality is that virtual assistants, inadvertently, become storage portals for their clients.
Think back to times when a client asks if you have a document from 6 months ago or 1 year ago or even 3 years ago and you do! I know some heads are nodding because I’ve done it too. That was until I realized I was hurting my efficiency and storage solutions by being an unpaid storage provider instead of a service provider.
It is not the responsibility of a virtual assistant to keep track or and retain client documents. This is why we do the work and return the finished piece to the client. True, there are times when having a copy of the work saves the virtual assistant time and streamlines the course of work. For those times, I highly recommend utilizing a shared cloud-based storage provider such as Dropbox, Carbonite, or Mozy to name a few – there are many.
One of the best solutions to free up space on your computer is using a cloud-based storage site and placing desktop access on your computer. Working from the desktop drive you’ll quickly and smoothly be able to open, access, and retrieve documents as if they were on your own hard drive. Remembering to save to the cloud’s drive means your client always has the most current version of work at their fingertips. Plus you can work from anywhere – desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or phone and have the files you need at your fingertips without syncing a thing.
Folders can be set up in this interface so you’ll be just as organized and hardly know you’re working in the cloud.
What about all the emails you save because you may need to refer back to something? Convert the important ones to PDF format and tuck them in a folder on the cloud, too. Say good-bye to archiving 200, 600, or 1500 emails from a single client.
And for Skype chats? Copy the conversation to a Word doc and place it in another folder in the cloud.
The key is to get these pieces off your computer so your machine is running at top speed and racing car fast without being bogged down by your client’s documents, images, and other files.
Remember the old days when files were stored to disks? If this feels better consider burning the files to CDs and dropping the CD in your file cabinet. It’s easy enough to pop a CD in the drive when you want to recall a document 8 months down the road.
I get a ton of PDF ebook giveaways and audios from attending webinars and online seminars. Some have some great information that I want to keep but do I really need to have these as active documents on my computer? Not really. I burn these to CDs for reference when and as I need them.
A few years ago my computer was running slow so I contacted my IT guy to offer some solutions. He nearly fell over when he saw how many documents I’d saved just in those freebie PDFs and audios. I hated to part with them because you never know when you may want to re-read the info. After spending a couple of hours, yes, hours, burning CDs I’d reclaimed a third of my hard drive space. I think my computer literally sighed.
So, before saving to your own computer consider is another storage option is a better choice for the well being of your business. Remember service provider or storage provider, which is your role for each document you handle and create?