Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Filing

Filing is one of those tedious tasks that I tend to avoid a lot. Which is kind of funny, considering part of my normal daily job is to do filing of all our invoices. I maintain that I don't get to do it at home, so it doesn't get done until I do. Plus it was always such a tedious task with our old filing system. Invoices were never in order.

Generally that theory lasts three months when I get sick of looking at the pile of filing on the desk in the office, and spend 20 minutes filing it all. Seriously, that is how long it takes me these days, so I have no idea why I don't just spend 2 minutes each week doing a small batch. And I have our new filing system to thank for that.

Lets have a look at under my desk

Up top we have two boxes from Ikea. The left stores computer junk (cables, instalation disks, random odds and sods) and the other stores non-claimable receipts (ie everything that I can't use at tax time). This filing system leaves more than a little to be desired, but meh, if my house is on fire, i can grab the box and deal with that later.

Then we have 8 lever arch folders, each with dividers
For us it was easiest to break them up into the following categories:
Banking
Phone/Power/Water/Rates/Insurance
Employment (which has our payslips, training records, union paperwork, super statements etc)
Pets/Fire Brigade/Health Insurance
Tax
Car/MotorBike related


As they are all clearly labelled, I find it easier to do my filing. Everything gets hole-punched, and the newest item goes on top. Plus if I ever need to find something, I don't have to spend an hour in the filing cabinet trying to locate its folder, only to find it has dropped down below the cabinet. Even the husband can use our filing system! That is how easy it is.

How do you keep your files organised?

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5 comments:

  1. Good idea!
    i wish i was half as organised, i have stuff everywhere and can "Never" find what i'm looking for..

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  3. Hi April - it all looks so neat and organized with your new system! Love it!! I still have boxes of paperwork and other things to sort through but I'm slowly making a dent in it. Our usual organizing system for paperwork is a filing cabinet.

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  4. Wow that looks beautiful and neat :-)

    I did away with paper filing this year. I sorted though everything and scanned it all in! Luckily I was able to do this quite easily at work though the photocopier so it just sucked it all in and I labeled the files in a logical way so I could use search on my laptop to find things :-)

    It works so far. I've just got one leaver arch folder left now with certificates from study, birth certificates etc.

    I think you did a great job with organising yours though, would be very easy to use too :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Thanks guys we are quite happy with it.

    I started scanning all our old bank statements, but then my usb drive crashed, and I gave up. I have since signed up to online statements, which work much better.

    Speaking of which, I signed up for Telstra's online billing, and a year later they still send me a paper bill! Doh!!!

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