Filing

From the "Handy Tips for Living" department, here's a note I wrote to someone about home filing systems and our personal filing system in particular. I thought somebody might find it helpful.

For any filing system, I think there are 2 things that you need to balance:
- Getting it filed quickly/easily
- Find it quickly/easily

The problem is, these two actions are counteractive. To increase the ease of one, you generally decrease the ease of the other. For example, if you make it easy to file (ie: throw it in a big box marked "papers"), it's tough to find. But, if you make it easy to find (ie: file it by company name, then month/year, with a cross reference note in a "utilities" folder), you've made it harder to file.

For each item or group of items, I think you need to look at which is more likely. For example, last December's heating bill? You're probably not going to need it ever, so I'd lean more towards filing quickly vs. finding quickly.

Here's our system:
- Bills: Each month gets a large envelope with the month/year in big letters. This envelope sits on our desk. When we pay a bill, we stick it in the envelope. Also, semi-relevant papers and other mail, like that crufty legalese that comes with new credit cards gets put in here too. At the end of the month, the envelope gets put into a large plastic container
- Receipts: We have a Pendaflex(?) alphabetical folder. Any receipt gets filed in here by store name. I'd like to keep these for a year, but they generally last about 6 months before getting to bloated and needing replaced. The key here is that you should probably know where you bought it. So to return that PlayStation game to Best Buy, you pull out the B section and sort through about 20 receipts instead of 2000.
- Bank statements and duplicate checks: We have a bucket where we just toss them.
- Tax stuff gets set into a separate envelope that we start in January and ship off to the CPA in March.
- "Important papers" (social security cards, birth certificates, adoption papers, car titles, insurance stuff, etc.) are in a locked fire-proof box.
- At the end of each year, all the monthly envelopes and the receipt folders are stuck in a large box, marked with the year and set aside, in the basement or attic, depending on how recent it is and/or how lazy we are feeling.

This works for us. It allows us to file quickly, and find less quickly, but quickly enough.

For bills, I really like the monthly envelope thing. It's easier than filing Cinergy under C and sorting by date. Plus, as the non-bill-paying spouse, I don't even know what our current electric company is called. And constantly trying to keep them in date order is a pain. So, just shove them into a monthly envelope. If there's a problem with the Cinergy bill, you grab the appropriate envelope (or envelopes, as sometimes it's in the next month's envelope) and root around until you find the bill. Considering that we've only had, maybe, one problem with the electric company, investing any more time in filing is a waste.

For other important papers, like certifications or insurance papers, make a folder in your file cabinet and call it "Certifications". Make another one called "Insurance Papers". You'll probably only have a few folders like this, maybe a dozen, so they don't even have to be in alphabetical order or anything. Again, considering how often you probably check your degrees or look up your insurance information, as long as you can say: "They are in this cabinet in a folder", you don't really need to spend more time than that sorting them out and filing them. Unless you have hundreds and some further breakdown would help you.

The same goes for work stuff like Salary Specifications and Employment Contracts. Though, you may find it helpful to have two drawers, one for "Life" and one for "Work". And if you have 30 clients, you may want to have individual folders for clients. Or projects. Whatever makes the most sense to you, is easy to file and makes it relatively straightforward to find things.

I tend to file project information, one folder per project, by date, with the most recent in front. Again, this allows me to dump in whatever information I might decide is useful, and, if I ever need to reference it, which is rarely, I have some digging to get the exact piece of info I need, but not much.

One thing though: if you're filing things that other people need to find, you need far more stringent, agreed-upon, published rules.

So, don't get hung up on the "right" thing or the "best" thing according to filing gurus, but just look for something that works for you and finds the right balance between filing and finding.

posted by risser at 08:18

Nobody has anything to say.