Hi! I am Kim Oser, a certified professional organizer and the owner of Put It Away professional organizing. Today, we are discussing organizing your home office. We just finished setting up an effective In-Box System. So now we have got some papers to file.
What you do to set up an effective filing system is you take your to file folder, and then I like to set mine up by color. So I take my to file folder and in the front of my filing drawer I have monthlies, and these I use for all my statements, my receipts. I include in here a folder that I just throw all my receipts in, and then I also throw in the credit card, the bank statements, as well as all the utility bills, anything that's not representing a policy, a medical or permanent record, or a tax document, goes in my monthly folder.
So I go through and I take for example, the bill, I use a marker to indicate which month we are currently in and I can just drop my bill in. I keep two sets of the monthly folders, I keep the current year which is 2008 which is an even year and then in the back of my file box I keep the odd year. So this will be my 2007 records. The nice thing is at the end of 2008, I can switch out these two folders and have the odd year back in the front and the even year in the back.
The nice thing about the this is I can then pull out the receipts and the statements from 2007 because they are now two years old in 2009 and I can just put them right in the shredder, because I know based on the way this system is set up, that all of my tax documents as well as my permanent records are not in these green monthly folders.
The second set of folders I have are the orange folders, and these are for all my policies that I hold as well as reoccurring documents that I get throughout the year. So, for example, my auto insurance, when the new policy comes I remove the old policy and stick the new policy in, and it reminds me that these are things that I take out and replace with the new information.
I use red to represent my permanent records, these could be educational records, birth certificates, home improvement receipts that I need for when I saw my house, as well as medical records and I include one for my dog's pet records. These are permanent files so I know that I am going to just put in and not necessarily take out except, for example, if you had auto records when you sell the car you can then remove these documents.
The next thing I am going to discuss is setting up a Stress Free Tax Organization System. So getting those files in order before it comes to the tax time.
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