Managing and Organizing Receipts

Saturday organizing time! Wahoo! I must admit I love to organize things! They may not stay that way for very long (hahaha) but I love to go through the process of it all.

Today we are going to tackle, are you ready? RECEIPTS!! Ahhhh!!!! Those dreaded little pieces of paper that we keep for budgeting purposes, tax purposes, warranty purposes, etc. etc. And the worst thing about them is they come in all shapes and sizes!! This is what makes it so hard to manage them!

Well have no fear!! Kyliegh is here! =) I have been using this system for several months now (like 6 months) and it is working SO well for me! Ready to see it? [...]
So first of all, if you have tons of receipts like the picture above then you need to sort them. I find the date (that is always like going on a treasure hunt to find because of the small print!) and then I print the month and day at the top large enough that I can see it easily.

Once I do this to ALL of the receipts I have in my "rat nest" of receipts. I then put them in order by date. Once they are in order I bind them with a binder clip.

Now if you have alot of receipts from being backed way up, you can stop the process here. At least they are organized and manageable now.

However, I highly highly recommend going on- and here is why! They will be "contained" in a book and it will be much less likely for them to get pulled apart.

Here is how I organize mine! I take a regular one subject notebook and I start marking the top right hand corner of the page with numbers- 1-31. Then on the front of the book I label what month and year it is.

 

Here you can see what I am talking about. This particular page was the 18th of December but you notice there is no receipts on this day. (Do you see the little bitty 18 in the top right hand corner?) Some days you will not have anything to tape down. But then other days you will pack on the receipts! (Now here is a little side note- I tried stapling them but if you ever need to take the receipts off they tare. Taping them does much better.)

Now some people make fun of me for doing this but that is okay. I actually keep ALL receipts- even fast food receipts. I keep cash and credit receipts as well! I do so because I actually enter ALL my information into budget software. If you are way behind it does take some time to do it this way but if you come home everyday and tape them down it only takes a few seconds. Let me give you some pros and cons and you can decide for yourself if you want to do yours this way.

Cons:
* It takes a little while to do this if you are way behind on receipts.
* It takes discipline to make yourself do this every day.
Pros:
* If you ever need to return anything- you always have the receipt to do it with. For returns I take my whole book in with the receipt still taped to it! They do their marking on my receipt and then I shut my book and off I go- with my refund money in hand! ;)
* It makes budgeting easier because you can actually see where you are spending your money. If at the end of the month you flip through and see nothing but fast food receipts, there is where your money is going!
* At tax time this method makes things A BREEZE!! (I personally do this for my business. I put a little yellow flag on any and all pages that have a receipt I need to deduct for tax purposes.)
* Warranty information IS ALWAYS easy to find! ( I put a little red flag on the pages that have a recipt that has warranty information attached to it.)
* You can dispute any false charges to your bank or credit card. I personally had this happen just recently and when I went to dispute the charge they wanted to give me some grief like they were questioning if I had "overlooked" it. Once I pulled out all my books with these receipts- they immediately helped me with getting my money back. They said as organized as my receipts were- I would KNOW if something was wrong!