Just landed a 5-year audit for a JEA account in Jacksonville. 47 meters, 2,820 bills total. How do you guys organize the file structure? Folders by year? By meter? Getting overwhelmed before I even start.
Best practices for organizing bill files?
Folder by meter number, then subfolders by year. Makes it easy to track billing history for each service point. Also keep a master Excel index with meter numbers and locations.
I do year first, then meter. Easier to spot billing period gaps that way. Also scan everything to PDF and use consistent naming convention: YYYYMM_MeterNumber_ServiceClass.
Whatever system you use, document it clearly. Had to take over an audit once where the previous auditor had no system. Took weeks just to figure out what bills we had.
Agree with Thomas. I create a folder structure template and stick to it religiously. Also backup everything to cloud storage. Lost 3 months of work once to a crashed hard drive.
File organization is critical for large audits. Consistency and documentation save hours of confusion later. Whatever system works for you, stick with it across all projects.