Organize Receipts with a 3 Ring Binder & Sheet Protectors

Order sheet protectors at On Time Supplies

Organize receipts with sheet-protectors-3-ring-binders

Ease some of the pain of tax season with a few sheet protectors, a 3 ring binder and index dividers. Take a cue from savvy home cooks and adapt the standard recipe binder into a receipt binder.  Use one sheet protector for each month, or try this tip for Coupon Fairies: fold your sheet protectors in half for twice the storage space.

The Get-It-Done Guy uses a version of this trick to track business expenses.  Here’s how it works:

1. Fill a binder with plain 3-hole punched paper and 12 monthly index dividers — one for each month.

2. Instead of shuffling receipts off into a file box (or lets be real, a shoe box), scotch tape your receipts to the paper.

3. Once you fill up a page, add up the receipts and jot down the total in the corner.

4. Use the index dividers to separate the months for easy reference.

Try these tips if you’ve been faithfully hoarding old receipts into shoe boxes. Or if you have a better method of tracking expenses, we’d love to hear them. Leave your tips in the comments.

Sources: Coupon Fairies, Get-It-Done Guy

Resource: The Cost of Being Disorganized

The Cost of Being Disorganized

Around here, we talk a lot about being organized. Obviously it makes sense, it saves time, and it can be a lot easier than you think. That’s the focus of a lot of these blog posts; using simple supplies, easily attained, to make your life easier. But here’s something you may not have thought of: what does it cost you, literally cost, to be disorganized? There’s a site that recently came to my attention that helps you figure out just that.

Organize 4 Results, who preach the “GO System” (standing simply for, of course, Getting Organized) not only offer a comprehensive suite of resources for companies looking to get organized, but they provide a simple calculator to help you realize what it might be costing you to put off organizing. I plugged in some hypothetical numbers and got the following results:

Cost of Disorganization prepared for FakeCo, Ltd:

You entered this data:

Average cost per hour (including benefits) for an employee’s time:

$25.00

Time lost each day due to disorganization:

0.5 hour(s)

The number of employees in your team or organization:

500

Cost of Disorganization Results:

Disorganization is costing you about $1,500,000.00 each year. The real cost is even higher when you consider the cost of alienated and lost customers.


Yikes. As you can see, it’s not always about putting the right things in the right bins; organization is serious business. And if you’re serious about it, check out our friends over at Organize 4 Results. You’ll be glad you did!