Paauwerfully Organized - How do I set up locations in the Paper Tiger?

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How do I set up locations in the Paper Tiger?
(Re-Locating in Sedona, AZ)

Hi Kathy,

I started my filing today with Paper Tiger. What an awesome program!

I ran into a snag. I wanted to have several file cabinet locations with consecutive file numbers. Each time I create a new location the number starts with 1. Is there a cure?

Thanks so much,
Re-Locating in Sedona, AZ

Dear Marian,

Glad to hear that you like the program. The more you use it, the more you'll love it!

You ask a very important and good question. There are two ways to handle files located in different file cabinets. Let's say that you have three cabinets located in the same room. In that case, I would only create ONE location in the Paper Tiger -- for the sake of this discussion we'll call it "Reference." Let's say that each of the three cabinets has four drawers and each drawer holds about 25 files. I would put a label on each drawer as follows:

Reference 1-25 (top drawer of cabinet #1)
Reference 26-50 (2nd drawer of cabinet #1)
Reference 51-75 (3rd drawer of cabinet #1)
Reference 76-100 (4th drawer of cabinet #1)
Reference 101-125 (top drawer of cabinet #2)
Reference 126-150 (2nd drawer of cabinet #2)
Reference 151-175 (3rd drawer of cabinet #2) etc.

Now, let's change the scenario so the three cabinets are located in three different rooms or offices. In this case, I would create THREE different locations, and I would call each one a name that helped me to know which room the files were located in. So let's say the rooms were Office, Rec Room, Bedroom...or I might call them by names...Bob, Carol, Marian...to indicate WHOSE files they are.

The word LOCATION can be confusing. BOB is not a LOCATION, but if the files are in Bob's office, I could call the location by his name so I know where to find the files. The individual hanging files would then be labeled Bob 1, Bob 2, Bob 3, etc.

In my own office I have created 5 locations, and 4 of them are physically located IN my office:

Action in my desk drawer -- these are the most active files that I am into all the time
Reference in a 4-drawer file cabinet across the room from my desk -- still in the same room, but REFERENCE means that I am into them less often than ACTION and it also indicates that they are physically separate from my ACTION files. If I had more than one file cabinet in the same room and they were all my files, it would still be only ONE location. If I wanted a certain segment of files to be separate from the others (client files, for example, that I wanted to file physically next to each other), then I might created a location called CLIENT and use those files only for client files.
Archive is stored in file storage boxes in my garage. If I had 10 boxes, there would still only be ONE location. The outside of each box is labeled with the names of the files inside (Archive 1-20, Archive 21-40, Archive 41-60, etc).
Fireproof in a fireproof box with about a dozen hanging files inside (individual file labels are Fireproof 1, Fireproof 2, etc.). This is a different location because these files are separate from the others, and the location name tells me WHERE I can look for the files...in the fireproof box. I reserve this limited space for legal documents such as passports, wills, etc.
Travel is in a file crate I created because I only have room for 100 files in my 4-drawer file cabinet, and the AAA travel guide books and maps took up too much valuable space in my limited file drawer space. When I ran out of file drawer space, I created this new location and moved the bulky travel info out of my reference files and into their own new "Travel" location. I can still look up San Diego in Paper Tiger and it now brings up "Travel 4" instead of "Reference 48" as the file where I will find my San Diego travel guides, maps, etc. If I had more file cabinet space in my office, I would have left this in my Reference files and would have called the Category "travel"...in which case, my travel info would have been mixed in with other kinds of files. I only created the new location because of limited space for my Reference files.

I hope this makes sense. If it does not, let's schedule a few minutes to talk by phone and we can talk about the best way for you to set up your files. Designing the locations is the most critical part of getting set up with the Paper Tiger.

Happy Paper Taming,

Kathy

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