Familiar sight? It’s all too easy to end up with a desk buried in papers. Letters and invoices from suppliers, jotted notes and requests from the rest of the team on the farm quickly build up. With precious little time free to sort and file everything the clutter builds up. Here are some of our tips to keep the number of papers on your desk under control and safe (everything on fieldmargin is stored in the cloud; it is completely secure and you can refer to it at any time).
1. Digitise your delivery and collection notes
As deliveries are received create a note to say the delivery has arrived and take a photo of the delivery slip and/or invoice. That way you have a record that your order has come so anyone who needs the materials in that order know they are available and you have a safe copy of the paperwork that goes with it so it doesn’t matter what happens to the piece of paper. Particularly useful when deliveries go to the yard and the papers with them are prone to going astray or getting rain/mud/oil/unknown substances on them before they can get to the farm office.
2. Banish the order slip
While these bits of paper may be a handy way for your team to jot down requests for parts and materials that need ordering they are prone to getting lost in a pile of papers so the order never gets placed. Instead, create a note for each order request with a
description of the items required in the comments. Easily ask for more information about what’s needed and keep everyone up to date with the order status. Once it’s been delivered, archive the note to keep your notes list tidy.
3. Save the planet and save money. Stop printing.
You can record all of your jobs as notes on fieldmargin so that there’s no need to print job sheets. Each note has a location so it’s easy to show where the task needs to be performed without printing and drawing on a map, tag the people involved so that they know about it and keep up to date with progress or questions in the note discussion.
You can also easily share files such as instruction manuals rather than printing them out by attaching the file to a note on the web.
Ready to try this on your farm? Head over to fieldmargin to get started
Now all I have to do is figure out how to use computer
Trying hard. Difficult but getting there.