One of the things I'm not the best at is staying organized. For things like bills, receipts, and documents my approach is more or less hoarding. This has gotten to be a problem now when I have 10+ years of old paper bills filling up multiple storage boxes and taking up half my office here. While I've given in some on the keeping of old bills (apparently nobody I know keeps more than a year or two of bills), I am also going to stop storing them in paper form. Today, the new era of my organizing these things digitally begins!

It starts with managing bills. I get most of my bills through the mail because paperless is not an option. For those, I am making scanning them a part of my bill paying routine, which I do online through Bank of America. Either with my desktop scanner, or on my iPhone through JotNot Pro. I'll combine them all into one monthly PDF, then encrypt and save them in a central location that is backed up both locally (Time Machine) and to the cloud (CrashPlan). I have a few places that I get e-bills and I'll save PDF copies to combine with my scanned ones. I'll still keep a paper copy of the bills but only until the end of the calendar year. Then, instead of just packing the paper bills together and into a container, I'll shred or burn them.

Repeat the process with things like important receipts, warranties, service invoices, and business cards. Tax Returns will be trickier to manage now that I'm getting away from Turbo Tax (taxes becoming a little too complex to do myself), but I'll figure that out as I go.

The end result should be the reclamation of about a dozen storage boxes and 100 square feet of space, all of which can be put to better use than they are now.

This entry was posted on June 7, 2011 at 2:25 PM and has received 1011 views. There are currently 3 comments. Print this entry.