Organizing Your Home Based Business Office

A Home Business Article Contributed by Alina Sandor

Why Organize Your Home Based Business?

To be productive your home based business has to be organized. There is just no way around it. Being organized makes everything run more smoothly, giving you more time to find new clients, which in turn makes your home based business more money.

Take Inventory and Make Your Home Based Business Work!

The first step to making your home based business run as smoothly as possible is to take inventory of the way you do things. How do you file papers? How do you keep track of inventory? Where do you keep client's contact information?

Is there a better way to do it?

If you currently keep paper records you may want to think about purchasing computer programs that can help you keep track of your budget, customer's addresses, electronically paying your bills, etc. The most common programs that does several of these things is Quicken and Microsoft Works.

Now take a good look at your office. Do you have papers all over your desk and are you storing your important documents in shoe boxes? If so, then you may want either use a computer program to store all of this information or get filing cabinets and folders to organize all that loose paper and the stuff in boxes. Typing information into a computer may take a bit longer than stuffing papers into file folders, but in the long run it can save time by making all the information easier to find.

Now that your office desk is a little more under control, it is time to look at how you handle cusomer's orders.

If you handle the shipping of products from your home you may be swamped in packing materials and boxes, as well as products. You may want to think about getting a prefabricated storage building, complete with shelving, to store shipping materials and your merchandise. These storage buildings come pre-built and can be set in your back yard, leaving clearing up a lot of space in your office for office work. It might also be helpful to have a second computer set up in the storage area to keep track of orders. Have this second computer set up so that it can network with your office computer.

Organize Products for a More Efficient Home Based Business

One of the easiest and cheapest ways to make your home based business more organized is to categorize your products. If you sell more than one product, you can waste massive amounts of time by looking for a certain product.

Put all of one kind of product together in your storage area. Make sure that when new products comes in that you add it to the right stack of products.

Also keep a running list of how much of each product you have and where it is stored. If you keep products in cardboard boxes you may want to put a different color X on each product's box and write the color by the product's information on your list.