Best Ways to Organize Bills?

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?"

Comments

Journaling accounting system.

[BoomerSooner]

Or you could just build categories in quicken/money/gnucash? and print reports at the end of the year.

I use Quickbooks for my business and those are my only writeoffs anyway.

Physical paper?

[MobyDisk]

Asking techies about paper for archiving is like asking the phone company how to communicate using tin cans and string. Go paperless!

I run my life as paperless as possible. I use electronic statements whenever available, and I scan the remaining paper. It takes me about 15 minutes per month. I have a CD with all my taxes, bank statements, car repair history, etc. back to about 1994. I keep a copy at home, and a copy at a remote location just in case.

As for sorting, I name the files by the date, and place them in folders based on the institution. It's not searchable without knowing the date, but I don't care. OCR could solve this, but I don't consider it worth the time.

Sorting? I need an system for _disposal_.

[dpbsmith]

I mean, I just realized last year that in the basement I had six shoeboxes containing twenty-five years worth of cancelled checks, invoices and receipts.

I tried to go through them, but realized that I didn't really have any quick, easy, reliable way to decide which could be safely thrown out. Sure, 95% of them were easy. Most bills and cancelled checks only need to kept for long enough to resolve any mixups. But the rest were fairly hard.

Tax returns? I think the answer is supposed to be that you don't need to keep them after ten years.

And in the really old ones, I realized that I was fascinated by the changes in the look of bills, receipts, and checks. The oldest ones were printed in ink with chaintrain printers, for example. Then they started to become laser-printed--in monospaced type. Then they acquired proportionally-spaced type. Then they started to get laid out with little boxes and sidebars and things...

Up to about ten years ago I still got--what DO you call those anodized aluminum boxes they always used to have on the counters of small businesses, containing what I think were continuous-form carbon receipts that might have been about 6 by 8 inches in size, onto which bills/receipts/invoices were written by hand? The typefaces popular for letterheads, business cards, and so forth have changed considerably over the years.

But I digress. What algorithms and rules of thumb do people use for deciding what bills can be thrown out? Pardon me, of course I meant shredded.

(And please don't tell me to "just scan them..." then I need to fret about archival media and whether CD labels rot CD-R's and whether Blu-Ray DVD drives will be able to read CD-R's and how to assign them file names and... oh, my aching head)

Why bother?

[ksheff]

Why do you need to keep the bills? Are you going to use them to compare how your utility rates have changed over time? I've found that I usually only look at them once I get them in the mail and then again when I pay them. If they are kept, they usually get put in a drawer with lots of other old bills and never looked at again.

Unless it is something like a medical bill where it's common to get charged multiple times, are you ever really going to need to see the details for your utility or cable bill ever again? Probably not. So why not shred them and get rid of them?

Prepay/Shredder

[linuxwrangler]

I hate paying bills so before I was married I would prepay my bills. Most (phone/cellphone/power/water) are so small that it costs me more in monthly stamps than I would lose in interest. I would generally write a check for at least 3 months rounded up to the nearest $100. Made checkbook balancing really easy. Each month I'd glance at the bill for correctness then file it. Saved lots of time. A friend of mine was more extreme. Every January he paid all his bills for the year in advance.

Now my wife pays the bills and she is ruthless about getting rid of paper. Almost everything gets shredded immediately after being paid.

I used to be paranoid about dumping stuff 'cause "I might need it someday" but I've gotten the bug and shredded lots of old statements and gained at least a foot of space in my file drawer. My desk is lots clearer and I can find the stuff I actually need to find lots faster.

Re:Prepay/Shredder

[Prior Restraint]

My only objection to your method would be that you're missing out on the opportunity to let your money work for you. You're earning less interest (or fewer dividends) than you would if you paid your bills as they came. You'll also have less wiggle-room when unexpected expenses occur.

I'm sure your utility companies love you, though; they get an extra couple of months to let their interest compound.

you just need discipline...

[jeffy124]

it sounds like you have a good filing system already, but lack the discipline to stick to it. you'll probably find a large number of people who file by month, and a large number who file by account. I myself am sorta a both. I keep monthly bills by account, and keep store credit/debit card receipts by month.

pick a filing system you like and get yourself into the habit of sticking to it in January, and dont let teh papers keep piling up into june.

Re:My solution

[Alrescha]

"I file all of my bills in a circular metallic file..."

Although funny, this is not far from what I do. I have an 8 1/2 by 11 computer paper box under my desk. Paid bills go into this box in chronological order. When the box is full, I throw it into the closet and get a new box.

The only exceptions are tax-related items. There are so few of those, they don't even get their own box.

A.
(who used to keep things meticulously in folders, until he realized that no-one cared, including himself)

Not to burst your bubble, but(+)

[Mycroft_514]

>Tax returns? I think the answer is supposed to be that you don't need to keep them after ten years.

If you get audited, and the government finds errors, they can go back as far back as you ahve been paying taxes, as my Dad found out.

Good thing he had laid a trap for them. The first errors they found were such that they owed him... Like not claiming a charitable deduction that ended up being several hundreds of dollars. They went back to the church that it was given to and got a receipt.

It was a large scale manger scence done in ceramic, and handpainted. Originally they were just going to give it and not worry about the deduction, but when the IRS came a knockin' about some other issues, it was insurance in the hole.

I had this same problem

[mc6809e]

I created a spreadsheet to solve this problem.

In the first column I have dates. In the next column the current bank account balance. In the next columns I have money in/out. This includes paychecks, mortgage, student loan payments, credit card payments and a column for other expenses.

Most of these dollars in/out columns is setup so that it checks the date in column A. In the case of a paycheck, it checks the day mod 14 (income every two weeks). In the case of the mortgage, it checks to see if the day of the month is the 6th and not a weekend, etc. Some checks are complicated like my water bill-- the due date is the Friday between the 3rd and 9th of each month. I also have to estimate certain payments ahead of time.

Then, all these columns are added together accross the same day and carried over to the next day's current account balance.

It works great. Whenever a check comes in, I just open the spreadsheet, look at everything coming due according to the spreadsheet, and payit. It even lets me see when I've got to carry money in my account over several pay periods to cover automatic widthdraws from my account for things like the mortgage payment.

When new bills come in, I just update my estimates in the spreadsheet or add the amount the other expenses column. When I have take money out of the account to pay for things like groceries, I use a debit card and update the spreadsheet when I get home.

Now you might ask how this solves the problem of getting rid of those paper bills. The key is to create one sheet of paper with all the information you need to handle electronic payments -- things like URL's, etc. When you get paid, go online with this sheet and pay everything you can electronically. I'm to the point now where I only have to write maybe one or two checks a month to pay for things. I keep one small stack of bills that go into this category. It's so small a stack, I don't bother with things like file folders.

Paytrust

[Illusion]

I haven't touched a bill in a few years. I pay $10/mo to paytrust.com (who bought paymybills.com, which I was using) to open, scan, type in relevant numbers and dates, and archive my bills. They then automatically pay most of them according to rules I have set up.

This is a far superior system to just ignoring everything but the pink bills (past due notices), which was what I was using before. :) $120/yr is way less than I was paying in late fees, so it is a bargain for me.

Excellent opportunity for Mozilla extension

[Tim Macinta]

I too have a large stack of bills that I sort through about once or twice a year and for that and many other reasons I have been wanting to switch to paying my bills online for quite some time now. The problem is that with online bills I would procrastinate just as much which is a serious problem because a lot of companies that I use only keep invoice records for the past X number of months (usually around 3 - 6). Most of my bills are business expenses and I consequently need to keep records of them, so I have chosen the lesser of two evils and continue with snail mail invoices so that I'll have everything kept around for my records even if I don't have time to load, save, and verify several dozen different web pages each month.

What I would absolutely love to have is a "recording mode" in Mozilla so that I could ditch the snail mail invoices forever. The way it would work is that you would click a "record" button on Mozilla to enter recording mode and then every page that you look at would be permanently archived for later user, including all page prerequisites (images, etc.), and all form data. Then, merely by paying my bills online, I would automatically get a permanent, electronic record without having to manually save the pages (which doesn't always work right anyway because some sites force cache expiration). Even better, Mozilla could detect that I normally record my visits to American Express, for example, and automatically ask me if I want to start recording the next time I visit, so that I don't even have to remember to click the "record" button.

I submitted this as a feature request to Bugzilla, but it could use some more people to vote for it. I would probably even pay a nominal bounty for this feature, though I don't have time to write up exactly what I want at the moment, so I'm just hoping that somebody else has the same itch.