But I am one of those people who will never get anything done if it’s a) not what I want to do, and b) even slightly complicated. It takes me months to repair broken doorknobs and such around the house, so with finances, the fewer steps in the process the better for me.

Ah, my poor wife.

I process my receipts immediately, that way there is no need to keep them anywhere. As soon as I have a moment (or after the kids have gone to bed at night), I sit down, enter the receipts into Quicken, and then file them by month in a little accordian-style coupon organizer. If the receipt is associated with a warranty, it gets stapled to the warranty and filed in my warranty file box. Otherwise, it stays in the coupon organizer for the year, and then when that month approaches the next year, that particular section gets thrown out and fresh receipts (from this year) put in. I’ve never had a need to go back more than a year for any receipt (other than the warranty-related ones), so this seems to work for us.

Dh made me two. A long nail through a 3″ long piece of leftover baseboard, painted black with leftover spray paint (from painting our brass mailbox black when the ‘brass’ wore off after the second winter), and four adhesive rubber feet on the bottom.

I have one in the kitchen for household chits and one in the office for business.

Of course, in order for them to work, you have to actually log the expenses….. for that I don’t have any system except NIKE (just do it.)

I like the check spindle idea!

Beyond that we keep everything for 10 years. Our old post-quicken filing process broke down over the last few years and for reimbursements it turned into a huge job to find the originals. I even had to hunt behind the unused desk they had been piling up on to find fallen ones. What a mess. In the end, took the $10 card I’d gotten in the mail for an office supply store and went and bought an armload of the recycled plastic accordion folders with 15 slots (they were cheaper than the paper kind!). Now it’s pretty quick. Receipts, statements, bills and everything get registered in quicken and stuffed into the appropriate month on the current accordion folder. If you need to find an old one, it’s not too bad to search for it. When we’ve filled the forth plastic folder, I’ll bundle the contents into a regular file drawer and reuse it. We can’t shred. We’ve needed to produce originals for too many unexpected things in the past.

We really need to start tracking all of this as well. With the cash only system we are using beyond the online bill pay services provided by the bank it would help to know where every penny is going rather than trying to keep a mental tally.

The only receipts I save are legalistic, or something maybe needed for a warranty or other issue, but they still get scanned. That allows me to keep a file organizer down to one milk-crate, using pendaflex folders. So, think smarter, not harder.

I use a program called ReceiptWallet (I’m use a Mac) with my Fijitsu scanner. There is a competitor out there called Neat Receipts, but I have no info on how good it is, or what it offers. They do have a nice package that includes a scanner with the software (bit pricey though, imho.)

That said, I am also a religious user of financial software (I use Moneydance, but Quicken or MSMoney is just as functional), so paper retention is kept to a minimum, but information access is at a maximum.

Tax stuff does go into a different folder (on 1/1 of a new year I write Taxes (year) on a manilla folder and keep that in a filing cabinet.

We don’t really buy much, so perhaps I don’t have as many receipts as other folks.

I clean out the box when I reconcile my accounts and shred all the receipts belonging to reconciled items. Unless they are keeper receipts (i.e. stuff I may want to return, gifts, etc..) – I file those ones away.

Between our household items and receipts for our businesses we have hundreds of receipts to track each year. I confess, at first I was overwhelmed!

Over time, I finally figured out a system that works pretty well. On top of my desk I have a pretty little basket sandwiched in between a couple of plants. We empty all receipts and other paperwork that needs to be recorded and filed. Each week I’ll go through the stack and sort them out into home/business 1,2 or 3 and then log them.

Please note, this system works best when I actually sit down and LOG the receipts. LOL

Take Care,

Trixie