Discussion Post: How Do You File Your Invoices and Receipts?

Whether you’re a bookkeeper or business owner, if there’s one thing we probably all have a shared hatred of — it’s filing. Filing is the little task we always put off, until eventually we can’t find anything through the sea of paper and receipts cluttering our offices.

This wouldn’t be so bad if filing wasn’t such an important part of a business.

People File Differently Now

But as cloud computing, internet banking and email have changed the way businesses operate, the way people file their expenses and important business documents has changed as well.

If you’re a business owner — that includes self-employed bookkeepers — and you’re taking one of our MYOB training courses for work, you’d have received our invoice by email. So how will you file this?

What about bills? There are many companies that now offer electronic bills — and some of these companies, like Optus, for example, even allow their bills to be automatically integrated into your internet banking.

Hard Copies?

A lot of bookkeepers would probably defer to tradition and print each invoice, bill or other expense and then file the hard copies — but is this still necessary? With the availability of low-cost cloud-storage software like Dropbox, are there other, more efficient ways to file and store your business records?

On this blog, it’s usually us suggesting new ways of doing things to help make your business more efficient, so we thought we try something different this time: we want you to tell us how you manage your filing in today’s digital age.

How Do You File?

How do you file your expenses? Do you file them alphabetically, by business name or chronologically, by date?

If you have a lunch meeting with a client, how do record these expenses? Do you include an agenda of what transpired in the meeting?

Most invoices from other businesses are emailed; do you print these invoices and file them or do you store them in the cloud?

If you store your invoices and receipts in on your computer or in the cloud, then how do you file them? By date or by client name?

What about those receipts and invoices that are still hardcopies — what do you do with these?

How do you give your bookkeeper or account access to your expenses?

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We want to hear from YOU about your unique or interesting ways of filing and managing your business records, so get in contact with us! Simply leave your answers in the comments below.