Time Warrior Tip #1 – Digitizing and Archiving Receipts, Bills, and Invoices

In this day and age of technology, I take a look around and see myself drowning in paper.  School papers, work papers, magazines, advertisements, receipts and more receipts.

Suggestion?  I started this process years ago and it works great.  I created a gmail account for my receipts.  Gmail is free.  Create a Johnsreceipt@gmail.com.  People create email accounts for announcements, weddings, their future children, heck why not one for my ever  growing pile of paper. 

I have businesses send e-receipts to this email and elect to not have a paper copy.  My receipts will live indefinitely in this gmail account.  I was even adventurous and created filters for the emails ie. Jan 2020, Feb 2020, etc.  

If you own a business, heads up, the end of the year approaches faster than expected.  Soon, the annual task of separating receipts into piles and categorizing begins.  Many countless hours, two bottles of wine later, I may have found all my receipts and placed them in a plastic accordion folder for our bookkeeper.

Suggestions?  For businesses, gmail is not the best option.  Business receipts needs to be sorted as you go along not just saved.  Consider an app like receipt-bank.  It takes a picture of the receipt and stores the receipts.  You can upload the receipts and categorize as you go.  I do this sitting in a school car line or during swim practice.  Your receipts will forever be stored electronically instead of residing in a folder for last year, this year, and next year and so forth.

Remove the clutter.  Organizing is a part of gaining your time back.  Don’t waste your time.