Organize Your Receipts
Organize your receipts on paper and on computer so tax time’s a breeze.
Today’s topic is organizing your receipts. The quick and dirty tip is to organize as they come in, taping receipts to sheets in a notebook, organized by expense type.
I’ll bet 40% of our economy is devoted to nothing but tracking money. Lawyers, accountants, bookkeepers, banks, investment banks all just create and track money. Even your local drugstore has cash registers that track money. And you. They build a profile of you, sell it to faceless international special interest groups who “Know Who You Are” and use it for their own nefarious purposes…
But I digress. The store gives you paper coupons and receipts. Billions of trees have died for your $3.99+tax receipt for that must-have bottle of Boundless Color Midnight Magic black nail polish. (I always wanted to be a cool, nihilistic Goth Boy. Instead, I was just a computer geek. Bleh!)
And what do you do with this paper receipt? Eager to play your part, you dutifully crumple it up, stick it in your pocket, and take it home. Where it sits with piles of other receipts in a big shoebox hoping to be organized on April 14th so you can do your taxes. If you’re in business, you do exactly the same thing, but you do it weekly and call it an expense report.
Transform your life! Control those receipts. Your corporate masters control you, it’s the least you can do to reclaim your power.
First, let’s stop with the shoebox full of crumpled ex-trees. Those trees were some other tree’s little saplings once. They deserve respect.
Go right out and get a binder full of 8.5×11 sheets of paper, and some Scotch Tape. If you’re in Scotland, you may have to get A4 paper and some American Tape. Go wild! Next time you empty receipts from your wallet, smooth them out. Caress them lovingly–a big chunk of your labor goes into maintaining all this tracking. Then tape each receipt to a page in the binder. Start with the receipt from the binder itself. When you fill up a page, add up the receipts on that page and write the total in the upper right corner. Then start taping on the back of that page.
Voila! Everything’s neat.
Since I’m in business for myself, I have to track expenses by category for my year-end financials. So I can just write the category name on the top of a sheet and put only receipts for that category on that sheet. For example, one page might be marked, “Marketing expenses.” That’s where I would put receipts for my web site design, my Get-it-Done Guy T-shirts, and of course my new BMW 5-series that’s just ”necessary” to impress clients. Or, when I get over my delusions of grandeur, my monthly subway pass. When I total everything at the top of the page, that goes right into the “Marketing Expense” line on my income statement.
Sometimes, though, you might travel for work and get reimbursed for a whole trip. You don’t care about the expense category breakdown; you just need the total and can let someone else do the categories. Creating jobs, dontcha know. Then, have a separate set of pages for receipts for that trip and keep them all together. At the top of the page will be the total you spent, neatly allowing someone else to cut you a check. More paper. Oh, goodie.
If you track your own finances, get a copy of Quicken or Quickbooks by Intuit to track your expenses. They’re easy to use, great programs that I’ve been using for OMIGOSH NO! 20 years, this year. If you’re a small business, I highly recommend a bookkeeper and accountant, since the best use of your time is to be out there building the business.
So remember: notebook, pages, tape. Receipt totals at the top of each page. Less mess and fuss means more time for you to go do healthy, economically supportive activities, like track money. Stay tuned for lots of specials on the website!
And just because I like you, I’ve got a Quick Tip for how to keep on track of your receipt management so it doesn’t have to be a time consuming process.
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Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
RESOURCES:
- TinyURL Link – Handy order form for Cover Girl Midnight nail polish.
- Visit Epic – the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
- Visit tinyurl – Get your Cool Quick and Dirty Tips T-shirts. Sadly, we make no money from these.
- Twitter GetItDoneGuy – follow me on Twitter.
Receipts image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
