Tips for using the Add Links feature

A feature in Small Business Accounting that one reader asked for more information about is the Add Links feature. This feature in a nutshell allows you to link files located on your computer or network to a document or other item in SBA. This is a powerful concept that could enable you to work in a more paperless way. For Invoices or POs recieved by email or quick scans of important bills or other documents from customers, vendors or employees, this feature lets you associate these external documents within SBA. Not every company will fully take advantage of this feature due to diminishing returns, but using it in a selective way to improve your business processes may make sense. To make best use of this feature, my recommendation is to create a directory to hold files being linked to in a structured way (see image to the left).

With this structure in place, you can start to capture more electronic data than ever before. Some examples include:

1. Job specifications attached to quotes
2. Invoices attached to Bills (see example to the right)
   
3. PO's attached to Invoices
4. Contracts attached to Jobs
5. Scans of Item Receipts
6. Etc...
   

Since these "links" act like shortcuts in Windows, they are a familiar concept. One thing to be cautious about is security. Make sure you store your files in a secure place and only share out the location to those you trust (the files you link to may contain information you may not want to share with all of your employees).

Even with the challenge of maintaining a separate file system folder to store these files and the security and backup around it, I am glad that these files weren't wrecklessly just added to the database. If these files were placed in the database, we'd all be needlessly sending around HUGE files just in the name of digitization.