Do you have an admin system for your house which kicks butt ? I think my butt needs kicking.

[hub2dee]

OK. Have had enough of piles of paper and total admin disorganisation chez hub2dee. Need to get household paperwork under control.

We currently tend to pay bills on red reminders (great system), pay credit card a day late (crap system) - and then hassle them to remove late payment fees etc... am sure you get the picture.

Just wondered if any of you had 'systems' which worked... where / how do you file stuff ? When do you 'archive' the old crap ? Do you try and keep your filing close to the front door / living room / kitchen or hide it away in a study ? Where do you keep your folder of 'instruction leaflets for important appliances'... with the appliance, centralised, distributed in appliance-centric spaces (ie kitchen for kitchen white goods and living room for delicious hifi and AV bits etc. etc. ?

I routinely create piles of statements, piles of bills, old piles, new piles, tall piles, small piles, piles of piles etc. etc.

I am sick of it and want SLICK

(Erm... dw is sick of it too, poor woman, woops)...

Getting our car taxed involves tracking down insurance certificate, MOT, V5 reg doc etc. and inevitably takes days...

I was contemplating one file for:

BILLS, with dividers for Water / Gas / Elec / Rates / Mortgage etc.

one for:

STATEMENTS with dividers for Joint Account / Our Separate Accounts / Credit Cards etc.

(but this is where anarchy begins... aren't credit card statements actually bills IYSWIM ???)

So, what do you do, and does it work ?

Should I start a file for stuff relating to New Baby ? At the moment she has (thankfully) very little for us to organise (birth certificate, BUPA thingy, A Premium Bond certificate etc.) but I am under no illusion it won't grow...

Would be interested in how crap you (hopefully) all are, or IS IT JUST ME ? Does your system kick butt ?

I have one big pile of paid stuff/birth certificate/insurance etc etc etc etc and 1 little stack of unpaid stuff that is on the kitchen window sill...I can instantly SEE pieces of paper...ie bills there, so know theres something that needs paid.
A lot of stuff I pay online via my bank account so i can instantly put a bill in the Huge Paid pile.
I have tryed systems and organization and it doesnt work for me.
Every few months I bin rubbish from huge pile.

Get a filing cabinet - you fool!!! You have a computer - but no spreadsheet for monthly bills?

I put aside money each month for DDs (that's direct debits not daughters) and have a savings plan for things that come yearly like car Tax & Ins etc

I only spend what is left after all the DD & savings have gone

This works! - at last something you can't do....join the rest of us mnetters

Just a box file for Paid and another for Not paid?

Will be watching this thread for a miraculous solution as I am too very bad. Even worse is that I have a file with dividers for water/ Gas/ Elec etc but also still have the "piles of statements, piles of bills, old piles, new piles, tall piles, small piles, piles of piles etc. etc."

With dd's stuff I got a pretty purple A4 box from WH Smith and just put all her important stuff in there.

Eagerly awaiting "kick butt systems"

I don't actually do that btw. I'm a piles everywhere person also.

Do you need me to talk you throught it slowly - it's easy honest?

OK, we pay everything on a monthly DD which can mean you get into credit with a company so not neccessarily a good idea( currently in credit with BT to the tune of £130. Usually though it works well on balance throughout the year. We do this cos we are not the best at organising.

We have a lever arch file for all matters relating to bank ( bank statements, corespondence and creditcard statements), and another for utilities and mortgage and insurance and such like.

We have about 6 files (you know the type you get in Ikea designed to go on a bookshelf) and one is devoted to all appliance instructions, one is for anything to do with school or children and one is for misc crap that you don't want to throw away but you don't know wher to file it. You know like clippings from newspapers.

The remaining ones are for phone books and brochures. I keep it all in the kitchen on a little set of shelves we have. Oh and a letter holder for stuff that has just come in and needs filing.

get a filing cabinet. pay everything by direct debit. easy!

I have a whole room dedicated to it, just chuck it in and shut the door fast - HC will stand testament to the greatness of our room of doom

We have a big metal filing cabinet (hmm - so attractive) and it does work but only if we remember /get time/can be arsed filing regularly.

We have a separate file for each utility and for things like wage slips, bank statements, child tax credit forms, IR forms, car insurance, house insurance, etc.... In fact most stuff has a file it's just a question of getting the papers to the files in the first palce.

BUT, best thing is to pay for stuff on DD or get electronic bills. British Gas have just started sending us e-bills so no paper at all. Hurrah!

How's Camille by the way? Just wait till she starts school - then you'll really know about having miscellaneous paper all over the place. (I know it's a few years away )

Hmmm...

well, our letter holder is full of 'stuff we'd like to keep kind of near the door' ... We have a W H Smith House Organiser file which has lots of subsections (too many) and we do kind of use it, but somewhat half-heartily...

Now, piles on window sills sounds more my cup of tea, but perhaps begging for a bit of identity fraud ???

I have found the spreadsheet / monitoring thing doesn't get kept up to date, and doesn't work for us. I mean, a bill comes in, and presuming no errors, it needs to get paid, doesn't it... Yes, you can look to see what the gas cost last Winter or whatever, but it doesn't change the fact that you need to have the money to pay it, and then arrange for said payment IYSWIM... we've got enough to pay our bills, it's the administration that is the nightmare.

I hope you are more gentle with your charges, katymac that with messy folk like me. ... and I'm gonna check your T-shirt has a Walnut Corner logo on, before I sign off your tax form, OK ?

Used to do all banking with First Direct, but then they tried to get arsey over some charges so I told them to f right off, so currently don't have online banking. I suppose (large sigh), that is what we should do...

Hmmm... now, surely the 'Instructions' box file is better separated and its contents distributed throughout the house with dishwasher, fridge, freezer, boiler > kitchen and amp / DVD player / telly > lounge etc. ????

Get online banking and pay each bill online as soon as it arrives and then chuck - why do people keep old bills anyway? Even easier - sign up for online paperless billing and pay by monthly dd.

pinky - love the room of doom. Hope your door opens outwards, rather than inwards... that gives you an extra few cubic feet to store crap, and in three dimensions too...

Witchycat - am being dilligent and preparing house so Camille never thought her parents were brilliant, but sadly somewhat disorganised and messy, LOL...

Filing and filing cabinets are boring and the whole thing makes me want to heave.

H2D - we have an 'instructions' file for all those booklets - found keeping them all together was the best solution as it's hard to keep themall with the respective appliances - where do you keep them for smaller items for instance?

We bank with Nationwide - their online service is simple but great. Nothing fancy but never had a problem with them. Ever.

I don't know what its called that we have. Its a kind of box which holds those hanging files which are labelled with things like credit cards, car, mortgage, utilities etc. This is always rammed. Occasionally clear stuff out of it and stick it in the loft in a box file. Then we have some more of the hanging files in the bottom desk drawer with instructions and other stuff that won't fit in the box. We have one of those Ikea magazine files on the shelf in which we dump unpaid/pending stuff.

Then we have a spreadsheet on the computer with all our ins & outs for the current a/c. Another for whats in the savings and what its allocated for. Most bills are dds. And recently we have started a ring binder with our monthly budgets in and mark off progress against each item (petrol, groceries, swimming lessons, a night out etc).

Filing cabinets are depressingly boring. Ours has a cloth over it and a portable TV on it in the bedroom so you can't see it. (Probably why we forget to use it most of the time)

Yes, suppose extreme online banking and e-billing are they way. I never want to see another piece of paper from these people ever again. Stick it online, let me look through the old ones online, let me see what / when I paid and never contact me, ever again.

No way - put all the instructions together your wife will have to spend at least 20 mins looking for the instructions, to give you time to prove you could do it without them.

Get a shredder or burn papers with printed details on

Seriously tho' I never pay a bill (well apart from Car Tax....)everything else goes by DD or bacs type thing

And I file everything...was informed yesterday that xyz was fitted in my house 4.5 yrs ago and I was able to say no it was abc...how do I know - well I have your invoice in my hand and that's what you said it was.....duh!

How ever I do have 2 small filing cabinets and like being very tidy (don't always succeed)

And no way anm I soft on them...children need discipline (so do men....imo)

Hub, I cannot believe this is your thread! Thought you were a whizz at this sort of thing

OK, I'll tell you how it works chez hunker.

We have a filing cabinet. If it's a credit card bill, it goes in the file marked credit cards, if it's water rates or council tax, they go in their files. DS has his own folder atm, and new baby will have one too.

Documents (such as birth certs, passports, etc), go in another file, marked documents.

Stuff to do with work (payslips, P60s, etc) go in separate files for DH and me.

Then we have savings files (bit light ).

Insurance files and pension files too.

And instruction manuals and guarantees get their own files too.

And the TV licence and the phone bill go in the same thing because it's a phone/cable TV/internet bill.

And then I have a random "house" file - and if need be, I make new files for things that crop up.

We have a separate box file for the car and the paperwork relating to that.

We pay gas, electricity, phone/TV/internet, TV licence, water, council tax, mortgage, insurances, etc by DD.

And, and this is genius - we have paperless bills for elec and gas and have swapped our bank statements for paperless ones online too.

The less crap you can have physically arriving through the door, the better

It's not perfect - and I still have a pile of paper on the desk that I need to go through, and I still pay the credit card manually. But it's better than before we had any system at all!

Oh, and I have a spreadsheet that just shows all our fixed outgoings and the dates they're taken - v handy for quarterly or annual DDs! It doesn't need updating every time one of us spends a penny, so to speak

we have it all

filing cabinet (large, 4 drawers)

pile by door

many piles in kitchen

room of doom (with infinite no of piles, including on top of filing cabinet, underneath DHs DIY jacket)

pay everything by DD but still have papers EVERYWHERE

why? why? why?

I too want to heave

It's not a proper filing cabinet though. It's a drawer on the desk

See... no one seems to have the Mother of All Systems.

Life is a Chaotic event (in the mathematical sense)... a butterfly flaps its wings in California and BT send me a bill...

You and all your filing cabinets... don't you just want to live a little ?

I want to have nothing. No paper. Just a few DVDs with all my photos of Camille and a synthetic pillow for my feather allergy.

Why do I need a section for buildings insurance, and then one for contents insurance, and then one for car insurance and then one for health / holiday / getting old etc. (don't have last three, just ranting)... and do these all go under one 'Insurance' subsection ????? Surely the car stuff goes under the 'Motor' section ?????

It's all friggin confusing and certainly not designed by a man.

motherpeculiar, you're my kind of woman. Love mess.

(Actually, it can be friggin depressing in a small place. You need to keep it so flippin clean otherwise it turns into a red phone box without blue Tardis-liek qualities).

H2D - Just stick to the nappies & get Dee to organise it all

this any use? Never tried it so can't recommend.

Sadly, Dee is weak on Incoming Documentation Allocation and Optimisation Strategies.

I need to lead by example.

I sometime put my own socks in the dirty clothes basket though. That makes me a New Man, doesn't it ?