This past Sunday I was putting away things from my weekend trip and decided I should tackle my cluttered purse. As I emptied the contents on my bed, I realized that I have a terrible system for saving receipts. What is my system, you ask? Well, I don’t really have one. Many receipts were stuffed into my wallet and others were simply floating around the purse or crumpled at the bottom. I try to keep receipts until I see the purchase on my bank statement, but I also hesitate throwing them away afterwards because I may want to return something or there could be a problem with the bank or retailers. (Here’s just another example of how I’m not a perfect PF blogger… in case there was ever a question!)
I have a couple of ideas for how to tackle this problem, but before I share, I’m curious about what others do: Do you save your receipts? Do you have a good receipt-saving system?
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I have kept my receipts organized for about 2 years now. I use to put them in separate white envelopes broken down by what the receipts were (groceries, clothing, misc, etc). This worked OK but I found that I had a lot of envelopes lying around! ha-ha
Now I have an accordion-style filer folder and I have many categories that I break the receipts into (transportation, health/medical/car, etc). I started this in January 2010… so far its worked amazing!
I have an envelope that I keep on my desk. A few times a week I clean out my wallet/purse and add the receipts to the envelope. The I use the receipts to cross check my cc bill and recycle the receipts once I’m done with them. It’s not the fanciest method, but it works for me!
I would LOVE to know the answer to this. I try to save them, but end up throwing away a crumpled mess after a couple weeks.
I am terrible about keeping receipts, and usually I end up losing them before I have a chance to return the items.
I hear good things about just keeping a shoebox on your desk, but I don’t think I’d have the discipline to actually do it!
I have a pretty little photo box I keep all my receipts in… it hides all the paper clutter away!
Inside the box is an accordion file that I separate by month. At the end of the month I look at each receipt and file away important ones/trash the others.
I have 2 boxes. i throw all receipts that have something on it that could be returned into one box (i.e. not food/gas/etc. receipts). January 1st I throw the box on the top shelf of the closet and start filling box #2. The next January 1st , I close up box #2, throw it up on the top shelf of the closet. I take down box #1, shred everything, and reuse it for throwing receipts into, and repeat. Works really well. I do have to dig if I need a receipt, but really, I return things quite promptly, so the receipt is at the top of the box.
Just a simple envelope for each year in chronological order. My brain works funny, it mostly organizes according to the calendar, but then breaks it down either by category OR store, so I separate out specific categories at need, but otherwise I keep it all in one Jan-Dec stack.