Organizing Your Project Files

When starting out doing translations, you will need a structure of folders on your hard drive that is suitable for your work-flow. The trick is to keep it simple without painting yourself into a corner too soon. To give you some ideas, here is my personal way of organizing my project files, which has served me well in practice for years.

1. Your Business

Start out simple – create a folder on your hard drive called 'Business'. Make it a rule to move every little file regarding your business either into this folder itself or into one of its subfolders. Specifically, do not leave any business related files (use shortcuts to them instead) on your Desktop or in 'My documents'. What you need, really, is a single logical entrance when searching for or backing-up documents – your business folder. Anything else could and will eventually get lost.
Sometimes, you will not only be in business doing translations, but also doing consulting work, design, etc. In this case, create a specific subfolder named 'Translation' within your Business folder, into which you place all relevant files to keep things tidy:
./Business/Translation/
./Business/Design/
In practice, your 'Translation' folder itself should only hold fairly general documents like your CV or résumé, instructions for wire transfers or rates exposé, whereas almost any other file will be specific to a particular client. It is unwise to mix documents from different companies in one folder for reasons of confidentiality, so there is need for subfolders.                                                                                    

2. Your Clients

Your translation business is centered around clients (customers buying your service), so it is sensible to create a subfolder named 'Clients', where project information will be stored, structured by client.
This is how our folder structure looks at this point:
./Business/Translation/Clients/
Now, you could of course create a subfolder in 'Clients' for each of your clients, but the growing list of names would quickly become confusing as you acquire more clients. Most importantly, as months go by, your client folder would also contain an increasing number of clients who contact you rarely or never more.
To avoid clutter, presort your clients instead by creating subfolders for groups of customers named 'Lapsed' (customers who have not contacted you for, say, six months), 'Prospects' (test translations) and 'Current' (all the rest).
./Business/Translation/Clients/Current/
./Business/Translation/Clients/Lapsed/
./Business/Translation/Clients/Prospects/
You should move clients to Lapsed after about 6 months without news from them. Simply cut and paste or move the entire folder of that particular client (see next section) from 'Current' into the 'Lapsed' folder.
Our folder structure is getting deeper, which makes for a tedious click through. It is advisable to create a desktop shortcut to the 'Current' folder, whereby you will be able to access your daily clients and projects by only a few double-clicks.

3. Client Folders

In this section, let's assume that we have created folders in './Clients/Current' for each of our clients:
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/
./Clients/Current/AlfaGlobz GmbH/
./Clients/Current/...
Each one of these client folders should only contain documents (non-disclosure agreements, snapshot of company homepage, company flyer, photos of project managers...) for one specific client. You should create a folder named TM, in which you place the files of a fresh translation memory for use with only this client to avoid confidentiality issues. Also, importantly, you should create a subfolder named 'Completed', into which you move all completed/translated project folders (see next section).
This is how your client folder for company 'ABZ Translations' might look:
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/Signed NDA.doc
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/ABZ_index.html
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/ProjectMgr.jpg
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/TM/
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/
What happens when we get a translation project from ABZ Translations?

4. Purchase Orders and Project folders

Every translation project you receive should come with a purchase order (PO) from your project manager. The purchase order technically is proof that your project manager has really commissioned you with the translation. An invoice without reference to one or more purchase orders is less legally sound in case of dispute.
Often, a purchase order covers only one project, but this is not the general case. Project references are really logical parts of a purchase order, and our folder structure should reflect this.
The answer is to create a subfolder named after the purchase order code, in which you create further subfolders for each project claimed on that purchase order. Unfortunately, as seems common practice with smaller agencies, a purchase order will sometimes be attributed only after you commence the project; if this were the case, temporarily name the purchase order folder 'PO 1' etc.
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/PO 1/
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/PO123_08/
In this purchase order folder, create a new subfolder for each of the projects the PO is made of for, as soon as you receive the files. The folder name should be named YYMMDD (date received), followed by a descriptive project name, possibly copied in from the PO document itself. This particular date format is short, and conveniently sorts in date order. I recommend it. In the case of test or courtesy translations, put 'GRATIS' or 'TEST' or both between the date and the project name. The date of receipt is important for finding matching e-mails during phone calls.
Example – a working folder created on May 17, 2009 for a test translation called 'PhotoSuite Website' and purchase order 'PO123_08':
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/PO123_08/090517 TEST PhotoSuite Website/
Let's suppose now that you have received all relevant files for translation, either by e-mail or by downloading a hand-off kit from an FTP-server.

4a. Revisions and Supplements

Some translation projects have distinct phases, for which we should be able to account for. After the initial translation phase you may get requests for revision, or supplemental material to translate. Let's create one subfolder in your project folder for each of these project phases. It is convenient to call the first batch of files 'Main'. Folder names for subsequent phases should include date and description (YYMMDD Review).
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/PO123_08/090517 TEST PhotoSuite Website/Main
Save or unzip all the project files into 'Main', and carry out the translation.
Once you have completed the translation of the project, you should cut the project folder and paste/move it into the 'Completed' folder, where it will await invoicing:
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/PO123_08/090517 TEST PhotoSuite Website/Main

5. Invoicing

We are nearing the end of our orderly project cycle :-)
Depending on your arrangements with the client, you may send an invoice directly upon completion, together with your delivery e-mail, or you may wait until month's end and send an aggregated invoice listing several projects. Let's suppose we did two projects for ABZ Translations in May 2009 and now wish to invoice.
The most embarrassing thing next to translation mistakes is when you actually forget to invoice a completed project, and thus fail to be paid for it. Our folder structure needs to actively prevent this!
Create a subfolder called 'Invoiced' within 'Completed', into which you will move completed purchase orders for which an invoice has been produced. (Make sure it has not only been printed out and filed, but that you have actually sent it to the client.) It is advisable to also create a subfolder with the four digit year to avoid clutter:
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/PO123_08/100517 PhotoSuite Website
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/PO123_08/100522 PhotoSuite Stationary
./Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/Invoiced/2009/
Notice that with this structure, we can accumulate completed purchase orders and the projects they contain (perhaps we wish to only do an accounting day once at month's end) without risking to become confused as to whether we had actually invoiced them yet, or not.
In the same way we treated purchase orders as logical containers for projects, an invoice seems a logical container for purchase orders.
Our 'invoiced/2009/' folder should contain subfolders for each invoice we produced. My suggestion would be to use the following invoice code: YYMM-NN, where NN is a serial number that starts over at one (1) each month. If your accountant or invoicing software uses another numbering scheme for your invoices, append it to this code if you feel it's necessary, but you should regard the code recommended here as the primary identifier for your invoices. Accountants and software come and go over the years – so do their numbering schemes, which may even be incompatible with what you had before. Let's assume that our example were the second invoice (regarding your whole client base) you were to write in May 2009. Create a folder named 0905-02, move the purchase order folder with its projects into it, then move '0905-02' itself into 'Invoiced/2009':
./ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/Invoiced/1005-02/PO123_08/100517 PhotoSuite Website/
./ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/Invoiced/1005-02/PO123_08/100522 PhotoSuite Stationary/
./ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/Invoiced/1005-02/PO123_08/Purchase Order.doc
./ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/Invoiced/1005-02/YourInvoice.doc

6. Conclusion

Here is a complete example path of the proposed folder structure for a finished, invoiced project:
./Business/Translation/Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/Completed/Invoiced/0905-02/PO123_08/090517 PhotoSuite Website/
In words, we may describe this as follows: Photosuite Website is a project we did for ABZ Translations Ltd. We received the files on May 17th, 2009. The project was part of purchase order PO123_08, which we invoiced for in our invoice 0905-02 (Second invoice in May 2009).
The path names are somewhat long, but do remember that this structure accommodates many important logical steps in the project lifecycle; it conveniently scales over years and hundreds of projects, remaining nicely 'human readable'. Long path names can be sidestepped by convenient desktop shortcuts, to '/Business/Translation/Clients/Current/ABZ Translations Ltd/', for instance.
There may be ways to adapt this structure to your personal requirements by extension or simplification; the present description would find its purpose if it had provided you with some ideas for storing your translation project files.

Michael Mangelsdorf
English/French to German Translator