As part of my job, I am required to assemble document packages and submit them to a governmental regulatory agency.  I am trying to develop a system to track the submissions and to save the relevant documentation, and I am wondering what approach is best.

The data I am tracking includes project names and numbers, names of people, milestone dates, contact information, review status, etc.  The submission packages are large and can include 20 or more individual files.  We receive communication back from the agency during the review and approval process, and these letters need to be saved and easy to locate.

I initially created a table in Excel to track the submissions and a network folder to sort the files.  This worked very well, but I suspect there is a more modern approach that would work better with our company’s systems.

My second attempt was to use MS Lists.  Lists allows me to display the data very nicely, but I find the ability to attach files to each entry is lacking.  As far as I’m aware, there is no way to create folders within a Lists entry.  Without being able to sort my files into subfolders, important communications are time consuming to find among all the submission files.

My most recent attempt has been to create a SharePoint document library.  This seems to work well enough.  I can create a folder and customize the columns to list the tracking data I’m concerned with.  Within the folder, I can create all the folders and subfolders I want.  My complaints with this approach are that it seems to lack the colour coding that conditional formatting in Excel and Lists allows, and it’s not very user friendly to create a new library entry or update an existing one (compared to Lists or Excel).

Does anyone have any recommendations?  Is there a better tool or approach I could be using?

​As part of my job, I am required to assemble document packages and submit them to a governmental regulatory agency.  I am trying to develop a system to track the submissions and to save the relevant documentation, and I am wondering what approach is best. The data I am tracking includes project names and numbers, names of people, milestone dates, contact information, review status, etc.  The submission packages are large and can include 20 or more individual files.  We receive communication back from the agency during the review and approval process, and these letters need to be saved and easy to locate. I initially created a table in Excel to track the submissions and a network folder to sort the files.  This worked very well, but I suspect there is a more modern approach that would work better with our company’s systems. My second attempt was to use MS Lists.  Lists allows me to display the data very nicely, but I find the ability to attach files to each entry is lacking.  As far as I’m aware, there is no way to create folders within a Lists entry.  Without being able to sort my files into subfolders, important communications are time consuming to find among all the submission files. My most recent attempt has been to create a SharePoint document library.  This seems to work well enough.  I can create a folder and customize the columns to list the tracking data I’m concerned with.  Within the folder, I can create all the folders and subfolders I want.  My complaints with this approach are that it seems to lack the colour coding that conditional formatting in Excel and Lists allows, and it’s not very user friendly to create a new library entry or update an existing one (compared to Lists or Excel). Does anyone have any recommendations?  Is there a better tool or approach I could be using?  Read More

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