1. that this will change over time, so your electric bill may get filed under “electricity” on year, “utilities” another and “energy” later; and

2. what makes sense to you may not make sense to someone else who has to file or find something in your files, like your spouse, accountant, estate executor, etc.

Since I pay my bills with Quicken, all payment transactions have a payee name and recurring transactions have a memorized payee name, and I can produce reports by payee.

For the last 25 years, I’ve used the Quicken payee name as the file name for bills and the account name (+ the last four digits of the account number if I have multiple accounts with one institution) for statements, both for office and home, and then file everything alphabetically. And neither I nor my various assistants over the years ever have any problem filing or finding things. My electric bill is always going to be filed under the name of the utility. If the utility changes its name, we will open a new file. We can always search in our Quicken reports by category, date, etc., if we forget the name of a payee.

This may go through a few more file folders since you’ll have separate folders for water, garbage, electricity, cable, telephone, etc., instead of one big folder for utilities, but it makes it so much easier to file and find things, I would never go back to a “whatever makes sense” filing system. And dedicated label-makers are now cheap and make opening new files quick and easy and keep the file names readable.

As we’ve been transitioning to electronic filing, we’re doing batch scanning by year and letter of the alphabet, of older files. So we’ll pull out all the files that start with the letter A, take out all the 2009 bills/statements/mailings keeping them in alphabetical order, and scan them as a single file named 2009 A-Vendor Files. The slowest part of scanning is naming the folder and it’s just a lot faster to do it in fewer batches.

EverNote does OCR after syncing to the server, but then you’re dependent on EverNote. Not the best solution.

This is great advice. For files only you use, file them the way your brain works, not by some superimposed standard system. The whole point of a filing system is to be able to find what you’re looking for quickly – & to be able to add to the files easily without a lot of thought.

Thanks!