Folder structure ideas for multiple clients with recurring deliverables (accounting firm)

Small Business System 30-39 Marketing, channels, customers, orders…
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Hi everyone,

Our small accounting firm is working on setting up a Johnny.Decimal system for our business. We don’t sell any physical products, and most of our work is recurring (e.g. monthly bookkeeping, biweekly payroll processing, quarterly tax filing, etc). Our client base consists almost entirely of long-term engagements where we have roughly the same set of deliverables each week/month/year for any given client, though the specific mix of services differs by client.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the best way to approach setting up this aspect of our JD structure?

For the JD index and for knowledge management in general, we’re planning to use Obsidian, with Sync for collaboration. We’re planning on having a separate file system with a parallel JD structure for file storage. I’m curious if anyone has advice on the pros and cons of storing everything in the Obsidian vault rather than having files elsewhere.

Thanks in advance!

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It just so happens that we discussed this exact scenario at length while designing the system.

Our assumption – not being accountants – was that you would do much of your client work in the client’s folder.

So when my accountant does my returns, I imagine she’s in a folder called Coruscade Pty Ltd or Noble, John (as we are two separate entities).

The SBS (you’ll get login details in the next 48h) has categories 33 Customers & clients & 34 Orders & jobs. In your scenario, we think you should do all of your work in 33 and potentially ignore 34 entirely. Because John’s taxes for 2025 isn’t some separate job that you track. It just lives within my customer folder.

People & companies are one of the classes of thing that is best left organised alphabetically. So do that. If you’d like to assign each an ID, put them in square brackets after the name. Use [01] or [001] depending on how many customers you have. Just add them in sequence – you’ll need a running list in your JDex so you know the next number.

So far we have:

30-39 Marketing, channels, customers, orders, & shipping/
└─ 33 Customers & clients/
   ├─ Aardvarks Inc [04]
   ├─ Butcher, Lucy [02]
   ├─ Coruscade Pty Ltd [03]
   ├─ …
   ├─ Noble, John [05]
   ├─ …
   └─ Zoolander, Derek [01]

Within these folders, my instinct says you want subfolders with dates. The month will probably be enough. So 2025-03 etc. And in there, finally you do the work. My returns for this month.

Let me know how much of the question that answered.

I tried this for our own system and didn’t like it. That seems to be the consensus here. Your JDex just ends up feeling messy. You want that to be a place of purity, calm.

Your JDex files should live in the system, in folder 00.00 Index. So rather than JDex being parent to system, it’s the other way round.