The topic of project organization and naming conventions has been addressed a number of times in various ways on ProZ.com. Readers may wish to refer to the articles by Shane Wall or Marek Urban or the discussion thread Organizing your work for other approaches.

Our system was developed after realizing that we needed something more effective than a software workflow tool to keep track of projects and deadlines in a two-person office with a heavy workload and frequent interruptions. It allows an instant overview of projects in progress as well as fast lookups of old projects. The system is based on a folder naming convention and a few simple rules for organizing content in the folders to allow billing work or other tasks to be done with as few complications as possible.

At the top level of the project organization hierarchy there are three folders:
- "Current and Unbilled" - contains current & unbilled projects
- "Billed" - contains folders for invoiced projects
- "Projects by Customer" - contains subfolders for individual clients. Each client subfolder will contain shortcuts (aliased links) to billed projects for that client.

To set up a new project, create a subfolder inside "Current and Unbilled". The folder is named according to the following convention:

YYYY-MM-DD ,

for example,

2007-10-18 ABCtrans 3K words contract.

The date is the date on which the project is DUE! If you name your projects this way, a List or Details view in MS Windows will sort the folders in the order of date due by default. This is effectively your "project schedule". If your optional text includes an indication of the size of a project, you can estimate your workload fairly easily and decide whether to take on another job or not when time is short.

The most critical parts of this naming convention are the date format and the client name. Other date formats will not sort properly in the directory and will be useless for schedule overviews. The client name will be important for organizing the project folders later after the projects are completed, and I personally find it useful to see how many projects are due for a particular client on a given day (each client will be grouped by day in the List or Details view).

When setting up the project folder, I immediately save a copy of the e-mail message with the job inquiry (and any other relevant follow-up messages) into the project folder. Each project folder will also have a subfolder marked "Source" (with the relevant source files) and one marked "Delivered" (with all the files which are actually sent to the customer, including notes). There may be other subfolders for references or other material as required. I usually leave TMs and terminologies supplied by the customer in a corresponding subfolder of the project folder. We also include a text file in the project folder called "billing.txt" which includes any relevant information on how to charge the job (time spent, number of lines or words to invoice, special terms, etc.). It is not only important to record this billing information in one easily located standard place for your own sanity, but if you share invoicing responsibilities with someone else (a partner or secretary, for example), this will reduce the number of interruptions by someone trying to figure out how to write the invoice.

Once a project is finished, if it is not invoiced right away, you might want to remove it from the date due sorting by adding "done" or something else in front of the folder name, for example:
x 2007-10-18 ABCtrans 3K words contract
If I have delivered on a date other than that indicated, I usually update the folder name accordingly.

When the project is invoiced, I add the invoice number to the front of the project folder name, for example:
1576 2007-10-18 ABCtrans 3K words contract

Invoice numbers are sequential. This is, in fact, a legal requirement in the country where I live, but it is also a good idea, and it makes auditing simpler.

The project folder is then moved into the "Billed" folder (top level), copied, and a shortcut (alias) to the project folder is placed inside the appropriate client subfolder of "Projects by Customer" (top level).

If this system is followed, the "Billed" folder will show all invoiced projects in the order of invoice number by default in the Details or List view of Windows. The client subfolders of the "Projects by Customer" folder also show projects for that client by invoice number in the Details or List view.

If a lot of one-off projects are done for private persons or companies you don't expect to do a lot with, you might consider a "Private Persons" or Miscellaneous" subfolder in the "Projects by Customer" folder and dump the shortcuts in there until there are enough to warrant a dedicated folder for a given client.

In three years of testing this system so far while using a translation workflow system at the same time, very often the folder list is where I must look to see what is really current. Often we need to find information related to a particular invoice - which we find in seconds in the billing folder - or we want an overview of business from a particular client, which the subfolders in the "Projects by Customers" folder provides. Each client subfolder has a list of shortcuts which can be sorted by invoice number to get a quick "historical overview".

Many translators use folder organization systems that are organized by client at the top level. I used to do so as well, but I abandoned this approach, because it required me to maintain a separate list for my project schedule, and with frequent changes and additions, this project list was often out of date. This convention with project folder names with the due date as the sort criterion is the best way I have found to avoid losing track of things when I am very, very busy.