How to Organize Your Financial Paperwork

Have you had to go through a pile of clutter wondering where you put the last house tax receipt?

Starting to organize your financial paperwork might seem like a daunting task at first but once you get started on it you would be amazed at how much time it can save you not to mention the stress.

Here’s how we organize our financial paperwork to avoid the awful feeling of having forgotten to pay a bill or something extremely important like our daughter’s school fees. That’s never happened, but you know, right?!

Use Files & Folders

We have used a system of files and folders for many years now to organize our financial paperwork. We categorize them into:

Personal finance

We organize all our cheque books of our saving bank accounts, related online usernames (but not the passwords like my mom does, even after repeated reminders), mutual fund investments, Life insurance policies, Government bonds, bank deposits, and recurring deposits in a file labelled Personal Finance.

Work-related

The file labelled ‘Work Related’ has taxation documents, salary receipts, and appointment letters. Now that we are self-employed it has a copy of our income expense sheets, receipts related to any office fixture or a computer/printer purchased, payments made to our accountant or web designer etc.

Automobile-related

Documents like a copy of the car registration, insurance, service history invoices, sale and purchase invoices, extended warranty documents

Receipts, Bills and Warranty Cards

This is our file of receipts/bills like the school fees, any gadgets that we buy like our phones, television, other household appliances and any applicable warranty cards.

Loans, Mortgage, Debt

Luckily, we have managed to stay out of debt for a while now. This file, however, has all our loan closure papers, EMI payments sheets, loan agreement papers.

Use Online Receipt Management Solutions

We use Shoeboxed to basically keep a backup of all our documents online. We use the same categories as our paper filing system and convert all documents into digital data to help create a replica of our file management system online!

Use a Hanging Mail Organizer

You don’t have to update your files every day or even every week. We use a hanging mail organizer where we put all documents, receipts, bills and empty it at the end of the month to organize them into their respective files.

We use a little time the same day to update our Shoeboxed account with all the new documents.

During our sorting and arranging of paperwork, we discard any old documents which are no longer relevant like an old warranty card or a receipt no longer required.

There you go. Our simple but effective financial paperwork filing system, revealed. Now, its your turn!