In one office, there might be many documents written regarding the same activity. But those documents would not necessarily fall under the same category. For example, the supplier might send back a reply. An employee of the receiving organization might prepare a note for internal use. And finally, the organization itself might send a reply to the supplier. All of them deal with the same topic but the direction differs. Knowing whether a document is incoming, outgoing, or internal is critical for registering, routing, filing and retrieving the documents.
Incoming documents come from outside the organization. A letter from a customer, an invoice from a supplier, a request received from another organization are examples. When we look at an incoming document, some metadata we might like to have recorded include the sender, received date, document date, reference number, subject, and status. Registration is needed in case we need to route this to someone for attention. If the register does not capture information about the sender and received date, we might find it hard to trace what happened to this document later on.
On the other hand, outgoing documents go in the opposite direction. These are documents created in the organization and sent to an external recipient. For example, a response letter, confirmation, notice, a filled-up form, etc. being sent to another organization are examples. Here, the recipient and sending date are particularly relevant. Also, we might want to distinguish between a working copy and the final/approved copy that has been sent. Imagine if we have several files with names such as response_new, response_final, and response_final2. How do we know which version is the outgoing document?
Finally, internal documents stay within the organization but aid communication, decision making, and workflow. Memos between departments, internal instructions, notes prepared for review, etc. are examples. The fact that there is no external sender or recipient does not mean these documents are unimportant. We might still want to record the author, date, subject, status, and where the documents are filed. New users might wrongly classify all documents with formal appearance as either incoming or outgoing. But direction is defined by where the document comes from and where it goes.
Let’s try to understand the difference using one short example. Suppose an external company sends us a request for information. A member of our team then writes a memo internally to assign the task to another colleague. Once the requested information has been gathered, a formal letter is sent back to the external company. In this scenario, the initial request from the external company is an incoming document. The internal memo is an internal document. The final letter back to the external company is an outgoing document. Now trace each of these three documents through receipt, registration, routing, action and filing. You will find it much easier to understand these categories than to memorize the definitions.
After classification, let’s also check whether our filing system maintains this distinction in a meaningful manner. For instance, our register might record the document direction in a specific column. Meanwhile, our filing system might organize documents by function or by case. There’s no need to create three separate folders for each set of incoming, outgoing, and internal documents. The key is that our classification should be consistent and the metadata should reflect the document direction clearly. Our filing system should help us retrieve documents, not create unnecessary categories.
So next time you encounter a sample document, start with its movement. Where did the document come from? Who is the intended recipient? Does it cross the boundary of the organization? Once you’ve established these things, you’ll have a good idea of the document direction before looking at its title or visual appearance. This should make it much easier to determine the appropriate registration fields, routing, and filing choices.
