Administrative Support
Document Intake and Filing for roofing contractors
Nothing in this pile was written by you. It belongs to other people, it arrives when it suits them, and the only part you control is what happens in the minute after it lands.
What the holding looks like afterwards
A holding that answers questions instead of prompting a search. Every document that arrived is captured against the job, the party and the date it arrived, in the place your company already keeps things, under a name that means the same thing next year as it does today.
Alongside it, two things easy to skip and expensive to reconstruct. A note of what was expected and has not turned up — the only way an absence becomes visible at all, since an unfiled document announces itself eventually and a missing one never does. And a record of how each copy was taken, which decides whether the copy is worth anything once the paper behind it is gone.
Everything here is somebody else’s post
Most back-office functions work on a queue the company generates itself. This one does not. The supply is entirely external, and that changes the problem in a way that is easy to miss: there is no version of this work where the volume is planned, batched or smoothed, because the people producing the material have no idea what else arrived that morning.
A homeowner returns a signed change order at eleven at night. A broker sends a certificate for a subcontractor who starts tomorrow. A building department publishes an inspection result with no notification at all, and it sits there being true whether or not anybody looks. A supplier’s invoice arrives against a delivery three weeks ago that somebody has already forgotten receiving.
Each is trivial on its own and each has a short window in which it is cheap to handle. Inside that window the sender is still reachable and the question of which job it belongs to has an obvious answer. Outside it, every one becomes a small investigation. The work is not filing, exactly. It is being present at arrival, the one moment the material explains itself.
Whether the copy is the thing
There is a question sitting under all of this that most contractors never ask until it matters, and it is not about storage. It is whether the image you kept can do the work the paper would have done. Rules of evidence answer it, and they answer it in a way that has direct consequences for how a desk operates day to day.
One state’s treatment, cited here as a worked example of the class rather than as a statement of national law, is California Evidence Code section 1550 — Photographic copies and printed representations of writings, which admits a reproduction of a writing as freely as the writing itself “If made and preserved as a part of the records of a business, as defined in Section 1270, in the regular course of that business”. Read that condition closely. It is not about resolution, file format or storage medium. It is about routine — the copy earns its standing from having been made the ordinary way, as part of how the business keeps records, rather than specially, later, because somebody needed it.
The companion provision, California Evidence Code section 1551 — Photographic copies where original destroyed or lost, deals with the case that actually worries people — the original is gone — and it turns on a certification made “at the time of the taking of such film or electronic recording”. Other states word all of this differently, and which rules reach a given company and a given document is not something this page decides.
The practical consequence inverts the intuition. Both conditions are about the moment of capture, and neither can be satisfied afterwards. A company that captures everything on arrival, the same way, and records that it did so, has met them without thinking about it. A company that files in bursts when somebody gets time has a shelf of images whose standing depends on a routine it cannot show it had. The discipline is not diligence at the point of need. It is that the ordinary handling of a document was never decided by how busy the week was.
This describes how documentation is used and the published rules that give it standing. It is not legal advice, it makes no determination about which rules reach your company or which records they cover, and one state’s treatment is an example of a class rather than a national standard. Those questions belong with your own counsel.
The desk this belongs to
Document intake is one desk inside Administrative Support, and the two limits that govern the whole department are set out there rather than repeated here — including the one that matters most for this function, which is that holding records is not the same as being the custodian of them. Deciding which treatment a document falls under, and answering for that decision, stays with you. This page covers only what is particular to getting the material in and making it stay usable.
What owners ask about the pile
What actually arrives that needs filing?
Almost none of it is generated inside the company, which is the whole difficulty. Signed contracts and change orders come back from homeowners. Certificates come from other people’s brokers. Permits and inspection results come from a building department. Invoices and delivery notes come from suppliers. Warranty confirmations arrive as email. Photographs arrive from phones. Each of those has a different sender, a different format and a different arrival channel, and not one of them arrives when it would be convenient.
Can we throw the paper away once it is scanned?
That is a question with a real answer rather than a matter of preference, and it is worth asking before the shredder rather than after. What makes a copy stand in for an original is not the sharpness of the scan; it is that the copy was made and kept as an ordinary part of how the business keeps its records, and in some cases that a certification was recorded at the time the image was taken. Both of those are conditions about the routine, and a routine can only be evidenced if it existed at the time. Ours is to capture on arrival and record what was captured, which is the version that survives the question.
Where do the documents actually live?
In whatever the company already uses. We work inside your storage, your email and your job-management system rather than introducing somewhere new, because a filing scheme the crew cannot reach is a second copy of the problem. What changes is not the software; it is that naming, location and the moment of capture stop being decided per document by whoever is holding it.
How do you file something when nobody says which job it belongs to?
It gets filed as unattributed and chased, rather than filed as a guess. A document put in the wrong job is worse than one sitting in a queue, because the queue is visible and the wrong job is not — somebody will find it eventually while looking for something else, and by then the sender is long past remembering. Guessing is the single most expensive habit in this function.
We already have folders. What is missing?
Usually the arrival step rather than the structure. Most companies have a reasonable scheme and a large gap between a document arriving and the document reaching it, and everything that goes wrong goes wrong inside that gap. A folder tree cannot fix a document that is still sitting in somebody’s inbox.
Do you decide how long we have to keep things?
No, and the department page above sets out why. Retention treatments differ sharply enough that applying one to a particular document is a judgement about that document, and those judgements sit with you and your advisers. What we do is make the holding complete and visible, so that whatever schedule you set is followed rather than intended.
The rules quoted on this page
- California Evidence Code section 1550 — Photographic copies and printed representations of writings — California Legislative Counsel
- California Evidence Code section 1551 — Photographic copies where original destroyed or lost — California Legislative Counsel
Ask for last month’s signed change orders
If producing them means asking a particular person rather than opening a particular place, the filing is a skill somebody has rather than something the company owns.