(Archived) Notebook/Tagging Strategy

[RonW 8]

We recently transitioned to Evernote Business from the standard version and are struggling a bit with the notebook/tagging limitations imposed by the business version.

 

We are accustomed to using a more traditional structured approach to categorizing information and documents. Trying to organize all of our business content in a single level of notebooks with only a single level of tags in each notebook is proving to be quite difficult.

 

How are others handling this more restrictive structuring?

 

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

We recently transitioned to Evernote Business from the standard version and are struggling a bit with the notebook/tagging limitations imposed by the business version.

 

We are accustomed to using a more traditional structured approach to categorizing information and documents. Trying to organize all of our business content in a single level of notebooks with only a single level of tags in each notebook is proving to be quite difficult.

 

How are others handling this more restrictive structuring?

 

Hi. Welcome to the forums. Your question is a little like asking a bunch of armchair quarterbacks how they think you ought to run your football team. You'll find we have a lot to say on the matter! However, it might be a good idea to start out with a few existing threads to get a sense of how the question has been answered before for regular accounts, and then focus in on how to apply the ones you find most interesting to business accounts. 

 

http://darrencrawford.com/my-simple-gtd-evernote-combo/

 

http://www.jasonowens.com/evernote-gtd-and-more-to-get-organized/

 

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s2/note/1b427c77-84e0-44f0-9636-7c140c89188b/bluecockatoo/EvernoteNotes#st=p&n=1b427c77-84e0-44f0-9636-7c140c89188b

 

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/23434-tags-vs-notebooks/

 

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/34012-notebooks-vs-tags-again/

[RonW 8]

Thank you for the reply and links GrumpyMonkey. I have studied these resources, but find that they are more about how to best setup Evernote for personal use. There is not a lot of discussion around the special needs of business.

 

We have been using the standard version of Evernote for the past two years now. Basically, any piece of paper that comes in the door gets scanned. This will include, vendor invoices, packing slips, customer PO's, correspondence from any number of sources including the government, shipping companies, regulators, taxes, the bank, etc., etc.

 

What we have found is that the best way to handle transactional documents (invoices, PO's, etc.) is to put them all in one folder as it is relatively easy to find them using the unique identification that you will find on every transaction. The problem comes with everything else. It is not always clear how to search for some documents. For example, a notice from the post office about a price increase. There is no unique number to key on, and just searching for "Canada Post" or some other postal term will just return hundreds of unrelated documents.

 

To deal with this in the past, we have used a more traditional directory structure approach using structured notebooks or tags. This allowed the person to visually narrow down the search to a particular sub-folder. E.g., vendors/shipping/post. With the new business version of Evernote, this is no longer possible. I suppose we could create a tag for each notebook that the document originally resided in, but that would result in hundreds of tags, which can get pretty confusing for employees.

 

We also used structured notebooks to classify dated documents. For example for expense reports we would use expenses/month/employee name. This made it extremely easy to drill down to a specific expense report. Trying to replicate this structure with just tags is proving difficult.

 

So I am interested in what strategies other businesses have worked out.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Thank you for the reply and links GrumpyMonkey. I have studied these resources, but find that they are more about how to best setup Evernote for personal use. There is not a lot of discussion around the special needs of business.

Indeed! I think you have raised an interesting point here. For example, you might have noticed that I did not recommend my own system to you (see the link in my signature). One of the reasons for this is that I find it quite simple to assign meaningful dates and keywords to anything I put into my account, but many of these would be much less meaningful to others. It is, as you said, a system well-suited to personal notetaking.

 

We have been using the standard version of Evernote for the past two years now. Basically, any piece of paper that comes in the door gets scanned. This will include, vendor invoices, packing slips, customer PO's, correspondence from any number of sources including the government, shipping companies, regulators, taxes, the bank, etc., etc.

That's a great start!

 

What we have found is that the best way to handle transactional documents (invoices, PO's, etc.) is to put them all in one folder as it is relatively easy to find them using the unique identification that you will find on every transaction. The problem comes with everything else. It is not always clear how to search for some documents. For example, a notice from the post office about a price increase. There is no unique number to key on, and just searching for "Canada Post" or some other postal term will just return hundreds of unrelated documents.

In this particular case, my system of dating + keywords might work well, but not exactly the same way that I use it. I think you will need a bit more to make it office friendly.

While the date might be simple (whatever shows on the postal notice), you know the keywords will be different for each person. I think this is quite a dilemma, because with thousands of documents coming in from multiple employees, it will become unmanageable.

It might be here that tags come into their own (I don't make much use of these at the moment). If you date all of the documents (I recommend YYMMDD) and give them tags based on where the documents originated from (usps, for example) then you would have two "hooks" for finding them. You could also apply another tag based on some other sorting criteria like its purpose ("customer," "business," "personal," "informational," or some tax categories like "charitable donation"). In this case, you would have a note called "130428 postal notice" with two tags: "usps" and "informational".

With the advanced search features that help you filter notes (http://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#/article/23245321), you can now be pretty precise: you'll have the last date updated, date created, attachment (if any), author, title, tags, and (of course) OCR of contents. In terms of notebooks, I would be tempted to keep it relatively simple (incoming, outgoing, in process, completed), but this would certainly depend on your business needs.

For instance, a search for all informational stuff (notices from customers, agencies, etc.) received this month would be "intitle:1304* tag:informational".

 

To deal with this in the past, we have used a more traditional directory structure approach using structured notebooks or tags. This allowed the person to visually narrow down the search to a particular sub-folder. E.g., vendors/shipping/post. With the new business version of Evernote, this is no longer possible. I suppose we could create a tag for each notebook that the document originally resided in, but that would result in hundreds of tags, which can get pretty confusing for employees.

This is where I strongly recommend filtering by searches. I only have one notebook myself (something I would not recommend for a business), but my 10,000+ notes appear to me just as they would for someone with 100 notebooks, because I use different combinations of advanced searches to filter the results.

In the example above, instead of creating a rigid and complex system of notebooks that include things like an "informational" notebook, just search using the criteria I suggested above. Visually, it looks exactly like a notebook (I see the same notes as you would see if you put all of your informational literature into a notebook), but without the headaches of deciding whether something like the usps notice goes into the "usps" notebook or the "informational" notebook.

Although I get by fine with one notebook, I could see it being beneficial to have notebooks like "planning," "sales," "customer service," or "warehouse." I'd keep the notebooks fairly broad by categories like departments, and use the tags for more precise needs.

These are some general thoughts, but my suggestion would be to stay away from overly complex systems that try to lay out dozens of categories ahead of time for filing (just about every traditional paper filing system), because that doesn't take advantage of the tremendous power that Evernote has given you with search filtering. Here are a few tips and stories, but I'm not sure they will be as detailed as you might like (http://blog.evernote.com/business/category/tips-stories/).

[RonW 8]

I have been fooling around with tags and made a very interesting discovery. (Discovery for me. I am sure many here are well aware of this trick.)

 

I was trying to come up with an easy way to search for documents using a more structured approach. For example,  we have tax documents, year end accounting documents and vendor invoices from 2010, 2011 and 2012. So what I did was tag all of the documents with their relevant year. Then I added a tag for each document type.

 

Now to find all of the vendor invoices from 2010, you could of course key in tag:2010 tag:"vendor invoices", but that is a lot of typing, with a high likelihood of miskeying the tags. Especially ones with mixed case. The easier way to do this search is to simply hold down the CTRL key and select multiple tags. This instantly constructs your search with multiple tags as you click on each tag. I find this to be a simple, logical way to locate any document set fairly quickly.

 

The only thing I have not been able to figure out is how to exclude a tag from the search while using the CTRL-SELECT method. You could have course key in a "-" before the tag you want to exclude, but to do that you would have to key in the whole search statement into the search box. it sure would be nice if there was a simple key/mouse click combination such as ALT-SELECT that would allow you to add an excluded tag to your search string.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

I have been fooling around with tags and made a very interesting discovery. (Discovery for me. I am sure many here are well aware of this trick.)

 

I was trying to come up with an easy way to search for documents using a more structured approach. For example,  we have tax documents, year end accounting documents and vendor invoices from 2010, 2011 and 2012. So what I did was tag all of the documents with their relevant year. Then I added a tag for each document type.

 

Now to find all of the vendor invoices from 2010, you could of course key in tag:2010 tag:"vendor invoices", but that is a lot of typing, with a high likelihood of miskeying the tags. Especially ones with mixed case. The easier way to do this search is to simply hold down the CTRL key and select multiple tags. This instantly constructs your search with multiple tags as you click on each tag. I find this to be a simple, logical way to locate any document set fairly quickly.

 

The only thing I have not been able to figure out is how to exclude a tag from the search while using the CTRL-SELECT method. You could have course key in a "-" before the tag you want to exclude, but to do that you would have to key in the whole search statement into the search box. it sure would be nice if there was a simple key/mouse click combination such as ALT-SELECT that would allow you to add an excluded tag to your search string.

Just a small thing: I recommend never putting spaces in tags, and always using lower-case. Keeping things consistent ensures you don't run into any problems with stuff like "2010 IRS," "2010irs," "2010Irs," "2010-irs," or "2010 irs." To keep things simple, I'd say all spaces = "-" and all letters are lower-case, "2010-irs".

[jbenson2 2,147]

Last summer, ScanSnap sponsored a webinar on how a business uses scanners to go paperless.

It was quite impressive. More higher-level than just tags, but you might find something of interest.

 

Here is a link to the summary and some of my notes on the presentation

The case study was on a medium sized law firm.

 

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/26906-the-paperless-office-a-webinar-by-scansnap/

[RonW 8]

Excellent tips for naming tags GrumpyMonkey. Thanks!