Working on My Business – DropBox to the Rescue!

Most of the time I blog about the different aspects of the cruise industry and my personal experiences of cruising. I thought I would do something a little different this time (but still applies to me helping you find the perfect cruise!)

Over the past couple of months, I have been working hard on my business to be as organized and efficient as possible.  As part of my work, I have to keep track of a lot of documents.  Multiple quotes for multiple cruises on different dates, your travel forms, contact information and so much more.  I have been blessed with so many clients this year that things had gotten a little out of hand!  It turned out to be really handy to have a husband who does social media and business consulting for a living!

Jason and I talked about the fact that I had so many documents on my computer and couldn’t access them when I was in other locations… I had to be home to access this important information.  I also didn’t have a solid method for organizing the travel documents and it was becoming harder to get to the right document quickly.  We looked at several options and I ended up choosing to go with DropBox!  DropBox allows you to store your files on your computer just like any other document, but behind the scenes it automatically saves a copy “in the cloud” (or servers on the internet).  The great thing is that I can access my documents from my home computer just like before, but now I can access them from any computer that has an internet connection, and from my mobile phone!

The other thing that I figured out was that I needed a good folder structure for organizing my documents.  I worked with Jason on some different ways to accomplish this and we ended up going with the following:

YEAR –> CLIENT NAME –> TRIP DATE

This simple hierarchy makes it very easy to get to the documents I need to reference or update.  This has been a huge change for my business and I wanted to share these two tips with you! Let me know in the comments below if this has been helpful to you or if you have any suggestions on what you have used to make your business more efficient!