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Best Ways to Organize Bills?

Posted by Cliff on from the indexing-and-sorting dept.

scorp1us asks: "Every year on the 1st of January, I start a new set of folders for storing my bills. Generally, I keep everything divided up by account. But this seems to take too long. I wait 3-6 months and get a big pile nad have to go about sorting it. I have been considering a per-month scheme - all bills go to one folder, each month. With all the CS people out there studying sorting algorithms, has anyone found a better approach?"

2 of 112 comments (clear)

  1. I use a 3in binder by space_biker · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use a large binder to keep things together. The bills get hole-punched and inserted into the appropriate section and when you're ready to file the old ones, they're easy to access.
    Things like credit card receipts are paper-clipped or stapled to the invoices that they were charged to.
    I don't think it's the best right now, but it works better than our previous (non)filing system.

  2. Try a payment service by SkywalkerOS8 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Try using a payment service like PayTrust. All of your bills go to them and are scanned in and presented online. At the end of each year they offer to send you a CD with all of the bills for the year. The CD they send is browser-based but has a light Java app that acts as a local web server, allowing you to perform searches and sorting of the data through your browser. I've been using them(actually I started with paymybills.com which was bought out by them) for 4 years now and haven't regretted it once. I just ordered my 2003 CD which includes my 2000, 2001 and 2002 records. About half of my bills are delivered to them electronically now so those are HTML instead of JPEGs.