How should we organise our document categories?
Quick answer
Group documents by purpose — by-laws, meeting minutes, insurance, financial reports supplied by the manager, compliance certificates and correspondence — rather than by date uploaded, so owners and new committee members can find things intuitively.
Key takeaways
- Organise categories by purpose, not by upload date
- Categories double as permission boundaries, so structure them with owner access in mind
- Fewer, well-chosen categories beat a large number of narrow ones
A document library organised by upload date is barely better than a folder of unlabelled PDFs — it technically has everything, but nobody can find it without scrolling through irrelevant results.
A sensible starting set of categories
- By-laws and scheme rules
- Meeting minutes and agendas (AGM, EGM, committee)
- Insurance certificates and policy documents
- Compliance certificates (essential services, and similar)
- Maintenance records and reports
- Correspondence and notices
- Any manager-supplied reports the committee wants to retain
Matching categories to who needs to see them
Since document access in Flex Strata is set at the category level, the categories you choose double as your permission boundaries. Fine-grained categories (separating, say, "insurance" from "compliance certificates") let you open up low-sensitivity categories to all owners while keeping others restricted to the committee.
Avoiding category sprawl
It's tempting to create a new category for every slightly different document type, but too many categories makes the library harder to navigate, not easier. Aim for a set of categories that map to how people actually search for things — "where are the by-laws" rather than "where's the 2019 by-law amendment specifically."
Migrating an existing mess
If you're bringing across documents from a shared drive or a manager's portal, resist the urge to recreate their exact folder structure. Take the opportunity to simplify — most committees find they only really reach for four or five categories in practice, no matter how detailed the old system was.
Keeping it current
A document library degrades the same way a compliance register does if nobody's responsible for it — set an expectation that whoever receives a new document (minutes, a certificate, a report) uploads it promptly, rather than letting a backlog build up.
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