You know that children’s book “Popcorn”? The one where the kids pop so much popcorn that it fills the whole house and even comes out the chimney? Well, sometimes I feel like my house is taken over by receipts and I wouldn’t be surprised to come home some day and find receipts spewing out of my chimney.

I’ve been blogging all week about my organizational systems for inventory, mileage and keeping track of cash purposes. I’ve been showing you select little snippets of my office to illustrate my posts. But the truth is, even though I do have a good inventory system and I do keep track of my mileage and cash purchases, I’m not immune to the clutter that can overwhelm all of us.

All week while I have been blogging, I’ve been sitting at my desk with it looking like this.

Um, yeah….not pretty. Between holiday toy selling and other goings-on, my desk has become a dumping ground for receipts, packaging supplies, scrap pieces of paper, and recently listed inventory. It was not a productive place to work, because every time I couldn’t find something, I had to sort and shuffle, creating a bigger mess and frequently not finding what I was looking for.

So, I owe a big thank you to Rebecca (for letting me blog this week) and Heather (for starting the organizational theme) for forcing me to clean my messy desk. I kid you not, it only took me 15 minutes to go from the mess above to this lovely, clean desk.

(And no, I didn’t just shove all the junk onto the floor….although I did consider doing that.) I still have a big pile of receipts to file (shown in above picture) and a stack of tags taken off clothes from a consignment store that I have taken pictures of, but not yet listed or put in my inventory. But at least the receipts and tags are in their own piles and I don’t have to sort through so much stuff to find them.

When I do get around to filing those receipts, they will go here:

I pulled it out to take a picture, but you can see it in the other pictures that it usually lives under my desk. I don’t label the folders, but I file my receipts by month. At the end of the year, when our taxes are done and all the receipts have been tallied, I paperclip them together by month and put them all in a large ziploc bag and put the bag in a box. I believe the recommendation is to keep receipts for tax-related purposes for 7 years (please double-check this with your tax preparer, though).

And don’t be like me and wait until your house is full to the top with receipts before you file them away.

Filed under: Better Selling Techniques, Organization and Storage by jmk_akk
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