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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?"
...are not news for nerds, no matter what "algorithm" spin you put on it.
I file all of my bills in a circular metallic file, which I clean out weekly. It sure makes my bill-organization easier.
Hold on, someone's pounding on the door...
With all the CS people out there studying sorting algorithms
I dind't know that people who played counterstrike would be studying in this feild.
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It's quite simple. Just take a hole punch, and punch two holes into your root-node bill. Each subsequent bill will take three holes (parent, and leaf nodes) Then, chose your sorting schema (dollar amount, utility name, month name, whatever) and simply tie the bill to the appropriate leaf node with a piece of string. Fast indexing, and fast retrieval. Voila.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
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.
There's not really much need, is there? When a new bill comes in, you can put it on the stack of bills that need to be paid. When the bill is paid, you can shove it in a big box, right on the top.
This procedure has a couple benefits. It's simple, taking no time or thought to implement. Plus, the big box implements a stack. If some bill needs to be discovered for some reason (a rare event) you will discover that the stack is mostly sorted in chronological order with the newest bills on the top.
When solving any problem, it's important to ask yourself what level of implementation effort is necessary. There's only one reason to go into the box of past bills: to find an old bill. A manual search through the pile won't be appreciably speeded when the pile is fully sorted by date and category, so why go through that effort? Just as good is the nearly cost free implementation of a *nearly* sorted stack of bills.
Of course, I am making the assumption that you are sorting bills to solve some sort of real-world bill-paying problem, and not a problem that a particular personal compulsion for neatness might raise (i.e. neatness/categorization obsession).
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What are your access patterns? Is this data just stored away and rarely, if ever, referenced again? Or do you frequently need to find it? Sorting, indexing and searching all require effort, but you can trade off sorting and indexing effort against search effort.
Also, you don't necessarily have to have a single solution for all data elements. Stuff that is likely to be needed frequently and/or soon can be cached in fast-access storage, stuff that may be needed can be placed in slower storage, stuff that almost certainly won't be needed can be placed in archival storage and stuff that definitely won't be needed can be discarded.
FWIW, here's my solution: I use a computer (and Quicken, though there are many workable alternatives -- that's just the one I started using 15 years ago) to provide quick access to all of my financial information. 99% of the time, all I need to know is who, what, when and how much, and the computer provides all of that. Additionally, there's plenty of incentive to keep it up to date, since doing so helps me answer the rather important question "Do I have any money?". It's also pretty easy, given I can download and automatically import bank and credit card statements.
For managing the paper, I use a multi-level storage approach. I have a "to hold" file that is my fast-retrieval cache, for things that I know I'll need soon. I keep two files and a box for each year. One file is "tax-related stuff", the other is "warranty-related stuff" and the box gets everything else, in a random, completely disorganized jumble. Retrieval of stuff in the box is slow, but since it's basically LIFO-structured, more recent stuff is easy to find, which fits common access needs, and I really don't get in there very often anyway. Any need to reach into the box represents a cache miss, and I try to adapt my caching algorithms to minimize those (without overloading the cache, of course).
I keep the last four years' tax and warranty files in the filing cabinet. At the end of each tax season, the previous year's box moves to archive storage in the basement. When a given years' tax and warranty files move out of the filing cabinet, they go in their corresponding box in the archive. Every few years I go through the boxes, and any that are more than 10 years old (7 is really adequate) get shredded.
The computer-based data, however, is permanent. I put backups in a safety deposit box. I expect it will frighten me in 30 years to see just how much money I've made and spent in my lifetime.
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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)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Try draining your piles with a large diameter needle about once a week. This prevents the secondary scrota formation and makes riding a bicycle much more workable. If you have such a large abundance of pile nads that they require catalogueing, perhaps you need to need to seek out an apple corer or it's surgical equivalent.
Thanks.
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.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Eliminate most of the unnecessary filing by throwing away the "normal" white envelope monthly bills. Wait for the yellow certified "disconnection" envelopes to come in and then sort those by shutoff date. As you pay them one day prior to shutoff, throw them away.
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.
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.