Organizing Business Documents

Today's story starts with the  two and a half years of minimally "organizing" the paperwork for our trucking business. While juggling with kids, studying, business and home all by myself, being organized had been a pretty challenging goal. Most of the people that visited our home have never seen piles of papers. The reason for our apparent organization were the few bins and boxes nicely sitting in a basement cabinet. However, finding a receipt could have taken a few good hours. In other words, it seemed organized, but it was actually a chaos. When things started calming down, I also started sorting our receipts, bank statements, official letters, and quarterly fillings. It took some courage to make myself go through everything but after three weeks of work (after 9:00 pm because during the day I had to keep working on other things) I started seeing the results.

The upsides of the situation are the newly organizing systems that I love:

- number one is the wall document tray. We used to keep the business receipts in small envelopes in one of the kitchen cabinets until I had the time to take them in the sorting area also known as the office. The result was a cabinet full of small envelopes with receipts coming out and different other business papers mixed-up. Obviously, every time the cabinet's door was opened, something was falling out. The first step was to create a system and that was how I bought a wall document tray and three large envelopes; I printed labels for each tier and now we have a wonderful system: we use the first envelope for all business receipts for a month; at the end of the month I take the envelope downstairs and start organizing the receipts; the second envelope stores the tax-related forms; while the last one is for different official documents (licenses renewal notices, etc);

- number two is stapling the receipts in a binder. I use the back of old bank statements or other unnecessary documents as a base for stapling. Then I staple the receipts in order by the date. The months are separated so when we need a receipt from November 16th 2012 we just go to the folder containing the specific year and month and then looking for the date. I have my bookkeeping software, that downloads all the transactions from our bank account and it sends them to the appropriate categories which already settled up. This is the reason why I don't need to sort the receipts by categories. I only have to introduce the cash expenses manually. However, they are not too many since we use the debit card for 99% of the transactions.

 - the third part of the system are the "tools" used for organizing the receipts and the other business paperwork. I wanted to have them all together and to be able to easily transport them wherever I needed them. So, I bought a plastic box with dividers and used for my markers and pencils but also for the paper clips and staples.

I usually like to have our desk clutter-free  so I am keeping most of the office tools like the perforator and stapler in a cabinet together with the business paperwork. In the same time, I like to have them handy when I am working so, I am using a basket for their storage and transportation. 

Have a wonderful day!