Organizing Expenses/Income/Personal Finance Documents (Paperless Office)
"If you're curious, here are my goals behind this silly madness You said it... The last two words, I mean...:-) If you're auditing your statements - why do you need to keep the info after the audit? You got the statement for last month, you verified that the Starbucks charge that appears there is the same as in your receipts - why keeping them further? Done, no $10 dripping, throw them away. Why do you need to keep your refrigerator owner's manual? What for? You don't know how to operate a refrigerator? You don't know who the manufacturer is to look it up online in case you do need later? Read it once, mark the maintenance details in your calendar (like: TODO: Change the water filter in 3 months), that's it. Done. Throw it away (to the paper recycle bin). You need the receipt as a proof of purchase for warranty? Make a ""warranty"" folder and put all of them there, why in expenses? You don't buy a refrigerator every months. That's it, this way you've eliminated the need to keep monthly expenses folders. Either throw stuff away after the audit or keep it filed where you really need it. You only need a folder for two months at most (last and current), not for 12 months in each of the previous 4 years." I'm trying to organize my financial papers as well.  I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap and it's tearing through my papers like a hot knife through butter (i.e. awesome). Here's how I'm addressing organizing the paper. I'm organizing mine a little bit organically.  Here are the main parts: So anyway, all that to say that it's not necessary to organize the files to the hilt.  If you want to, that's fine too, but it's a tradeoff:  up-front organization for possibly some time savings later.  The search function available is decreasing the advantage of organizing your files carefully.  If throwing all of your files in a digital pile makes your skin crawl, then I won't force you otherwise, but I'm not worried about it for the time being. What you're doing with the other tracking sounds fine to me.  Others may have different insights there. If it was me, I would organize something along these lines.  in large part because down the road when it comes time to purge stuff like small receipts, utility bills etc, you'll be doing it per year, at the 7 year point or something similar. Year first Under that major categories such as Mortgage, Utilities, Credit, Major Purchases, Home Improvement, Other I'd do a monthly breakdown for Other since it's likely to have a lot of little stuff, and bulking it up by month helps to organize it.  But I'd not bother with that for the other items, since there's going to be limited items in each one. If you are scanning stuff on a regular basis, and using a decent naming convention for the receipts, then you could easily sort by date, or name, within any of the larger categories to see for example, all the electric bills. in order. You might also want to look at a cloud service such as DOXO as an alternative to storing this stuff at home (they also work with a number of companies to do electronic billing etc)  In terms of retention, if you are a homeowner, save anything related to your mortgage and anything that goes towards the house, even little maintenance stuff, and any improvements, as all of that goes against the cost basis of the house when you sell.  Generally, after 7 years, you are unlikely to need anything in the way of small receipts, utility bills, etc.   in any case, be sure you have regular backups offsite, either by storing stuff in the cloud such as doxo, or via a regular backup service such as carbonite.  you don't want to lose all your records to a house fire, natural disaster, or having your computer stolen etc.
According to TurboTax, it is perfectly legal to final as an individual with zero income. But, alas, according to Entities, by the IRS, you must file as a partnership or a corporation even if you have zero income.  As for my two cents, I can only see it being advantageous for filing on expense purposes, but as you have no income, the point is mute. Hope it all goes over well as the forms are due March 15. I would suggest at least getting a personal card that you only use for business expenses, even if you don't opt for a business card.  It makes it very clear that expenses on that card are business expenses, and is just more professional.  The same goes for a checking account, if you have one of those.  It makes it easier to defend if you are ever audited, and if you use an accountant or tax preparer. Your list seems fairly complete.  Try tracking a few months of actual expenses.  You could do this with an Excel Spreadsheet.   Personally, I pay for most things electronically and/or with a credit card (which I pay off in full every month).  I use Mint.com to catalogue my transactions and get an instant snapshot of where I've been spending my money. "Here's a very basic MySQL query I put together that does what I want for  income/expense report. Basically it reports the same info as the canned income/expense report, but limits it those income/expenses associated with a particular account (rental property, in my case).  My main complaint is the output ""report"" is pretty ugly. And modifying for a different rental property requires changing the code (I could pass parameters etc). Again, the main ""issue"" in my mind with GnuCash income/expense report is that there is no filter for which account (rental property) you want income/expenses for, unless you set up account tree so that each rental property has its own defined incomes and expenses (i.e. PropertyA:Expense:Utility:electric).  Hopefully someone will point me to a more elegant solution that uses the report generator built into GnuCash. THanks! SELECT a2.account_type , a4.name, a3.name, a2.name, SUM(ROUND(IF(a2.account_type='EXPENSE',-  s2.value_num,ABS(s2.value_num))/s2.value_denom,2)) AS amt FROM    (     SELECT  s1.tx_guid     FROM    gnucash.accounts AS a1         INNER JOIN gnucash.splits AS s1 ON s1.account_guid = a1.guid     WHERE   a1.name='Property A'         ) AS X     INNER JOIN gnucash.splits s2 ON x.tx_guid = s2.tx_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.accounts a2 ON a2.guid=s2.account_guid     INNER JOIN gnucash.transactions t ON t.guid=s2.tx_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a3 ON a3.guid = a2.parent_guid     LEFT JOIN gnucash.accounts a4 ON a4.guid = a3.parent_guid WHERE   a2.name <> 'Property A' # get all the accounts associated with tx in Property A account (but not the actual Property A Bank duplicate entries.         AND t.post_date BETWEEN CAST('2016-01-01' AS DATE) AND CAST('2016-12-31' AS DATE) GROUP BY a2.account_type ,a4.name, a3.name, a2.name  WITH ROLLUP ; And here's the output. Hopefully someone has a better suggested approach!" I'm not familiar with Gnucash, but I can discuss double-entry bookkeeping in general. I think the typical solution to something like this is to create an Asset account for what this other person owes you. This represents the money that he owes you. It's an Accounts Receivable. Method 1: Do you have/need separate accounts for each company that you are paying for this person? Do you need to record where the money is going? If not, then all you need is: When you pay a bill, you credit (subtract from) Checking and debit (add to) Friend Account. When he pays you, you credit (subtract from) Friend Account and debit (add to) Checking. That is, when you pay a bill for your friend you are turning one asset, cash, into a different kind of asset, receivable. When he pays you, you are doing the reverse. There's no need to create a new account each time you pay a bill. Just keep a rolling balance on this My Friend account. It's like a credit card: you don't get a new card each time you make a purchase, you just add to the balance. When you make a payment, you subtract from the balance. Method 2: If you need to record where the money is going, then you'd have to create accounts for each of the companies that you pay bills to. These would be Expense accounts.  Then you'd need to create two accounts for your friend: An Asset account for the money he owes you, and an Income account for the stream of money coming in. So when you pay a bill, you'd credit Checking, debit My Friend Owes Me, credit the company expense account, and debit the Money from My Friend income account.  When he repays you, you'd credit My Friend Owes Me and debit Checking. You don't change the income or expense accounts. Method 3: You could enter bills when they're received as a liability and then eliminate the liability when you pay them. This is probably more work than you want to go to. "Not knowing anything about your situation or what makes it so complex, I would have to agree with the other commenters.  If your accountant screws up your business goes under, but at least your personal finances are safe from that and you'll recover (unless all your wealth is tied up in your business).  If your virtual assistant uses your personal information to take all your money, ruin your credit, or any number of other things, you're going to spend a loooong time trying to get things ""back to normal"". If the few hours per month spent managing your finances is starting to add up, I might suggest looking into other ways to automate and manage them.  For instance, are all of your bills (or as many as you can) e-bills that can be issued electronically to your bank?  Have you set up online bill pay with your bank, so that you can automatically pay all the bills when they arrive?  Have you tried using any number of online services (Mint, Thrive, your bank's ""virtual wallet/portfolio"") to help with budget, expense tracking, etc.? Again, I don't know your exact situation, but hopefully some of these suggestions help.  Once I started automating my savings and a lot of my bill paying, it gave me a lot of peace of mind." Shred it all.  You might want to keep a record going back at most a year, just in case.  But just in case of what?  What is a good idea is to have an electronic record.  It's a good practice to know how your spending changes over time.  Beyond that, it's just a fire hazard. The thing is, I know I'm right in the above paragraph, but I'm a hypocrite:  I have years' worth of paper records of all kinds.  I need to get rid of it.  But I have grown attached.  I have trucked this stuff around in move after move.  I have a skill at taking good care of useless things.  I've even thought of hiring somebody to scan it all in for me, so that I can feel safe shredding all this paper without losing any of the data.  But that's insane! For double entry bookkeeping, personal or small business, GnuCash is very good. Exists for Mac Os. "As others have said, the decision is a very personal one. Personally, I think you have a good idea. For those of us that thrive in structured systems having a detailed breakdown and distribution of assets is a great idea. I recommend going one step further however. Instead of having a single ""Necessities"" account have a division here. 1 account for ""Bills"" and another for ""Living Expenses."" Your Bills account should recieve the funds to pay your monthly expenses such as Rent, Utilities, Insurance. Living Expenses is for day to day spending. I recommend this because your Bills are generally a fairly fixed expense. Keeping your flexible spending separate allows you to manage it more carefully and helps prevent overspending.  I keep my Living Expenses in cash and divide it up by the number of days before my next check. Every day I put my portion of the Living Expenses in my wallet. This way I know that I can spend as much money in my wallet and still be fine for the rest of the pay period. I also know that if I want to go out to a nice dinner on Friday, it would be helpful if I have money left over at the end of the day Monday through Thursday." "What you are describing is a Chart of Accounts.  It's a structure used by accountants to categorise accounts into sub-categories below the standard Asset/Liability/Income/Expense structure. The actual categories used will vary widely between different people and different companies.  Every person and company is different, whilst you may be happy to have a single expense account called ""Lunch"", I may want lots of expense accounts to distinguish between all the different restaurants I eat at regularly.  Companies will often change their chart of accounts over time as they decide they want to capture more (or less) detail on where a particular type of Expense is really being spent. All of this makes any attempt to create a standard (in the strict sense) rather futile.  I have worked at a few places where discussions about how to structure the chart of accounts and what referencing scheme to use can be surprisingly heated!  You'll have to come up with your own system, but I can provide a few common recommendations: If you're looking for some simple examples to get started with, most personal finance software (e.g. GnuCash) will offer to create an example chart of accounts when you first start a session." hledger is a free software, cross-platform double-entry accounting tool I've been working on for a while. It has command-line and web-based interfaces to your local data, and some other interesting features. There's also ledger (http://wiki.github.com/jwiegley/ledger/) which is command-line only. These are.. different, but worth a look for some folks. Certainly sounds worthwhile to get a CPA to help you with setting up the books properly and learning to maintain them, even if you do it yourself thereafter. What's your own time worth? It sounds like you're mixing a simple checkbook register with double-entry bookkeeping. Do you need a double-entry level of rigor? Otherwise, why not have two columns, one for income (like a paycheck) and one for expenses (like paying a cable bill)?  Then add up both columns and then take the difference of the sums to get your increase or decrease for the time period. If you want to break up income and expenses further, then you can do that too. "What you are describing sounds a lot like the way we handle our household budget.  This is possible, but quite difficult to do with an Excel spreadsheet.  It is much easier to do with dedicated budgeting software designed for this purpose. When choosing personal budgeting software, I've found that the available packages fall in two broad categories: Some packages take what I would call a proactive approach: You enter in your bank account balances, and assign your money into spending categories.  When you deposit your paycheck, you do the same thing: you add this money to your spending categories.  Then when you spend money, you assign it to a spending category, and the software keeps track of your category balances.  At any time, you can see both your bank balances and your spending category balances.  If you need to spend money in a category that doesn't have any more money, you'll need to move money from a different category into that one.  This approach is sometimes called the envelope system, because it resembles a digital version of putting your cash into different envelopes with different purposes.  A few examples of software in this category are You Need a Budget (YNAB), Mvelopes, and EveryDollar. Other packages take more of a reactive approach: You don't bother assigning a job to the money already in your bank account.  Instead, you just enter your monthly income and put together a spending plan.  As you spend money, you assign the transactions to a spending category, and at the end of the month, you can see what you actually spent vs. what your plan was, and try to adjust your next budget accordingly.  Software that takes this approach includes Quicken and Mint.com. I use and recommend the proactive approach, and it sounds from your question like this is the approach that you are looking for.  I've used several different budgeting software packages, and my personal recommendation is for YNAB, the software that we currently use.  I don't want this post to sound too much like a commercial, but I believe it will do everything you are looking for.   One of the great things about the proactive approach, in my opinion, is how credit card accounts are handled.  Since your spending category balances only include real money actually sitting in an account (not projected income for the month), when you spend money out of a category with your credit card, the software deducts the money from the spending category immediately, as it is already spent.  The credit card balance goes negative.  When the credit card bill comes and you pay it, this is handled in the software as an account transfer from your checking account to your credit card account.  The money in the checking account is already set aside for the purpose of paying your credit card bill. Dedicated budgeting software generally has a reconcile feature that makes verifying your bank statements very easy.  You just enter the date of your bank statement and the balance, and then the software shows you a list of the transactions that fall in those dates.  You can check each one against the transactions on the statement, editing the ones that aren't right and adding any that are missing from the software.  After everything checks out, the software marks the transactions as verified, so you can easily see what has cleared and what hasn't. Let me give you an example to clarify, in response to your comment.  This example is specific to YNAB, but other software using the same approach would work in a similar way. Let's say that you have a checking account and a credit card account.  Your checking account, named CHECKING, has $2,000 in it currently.  Your credit card currently has nothing charged on it, because you've just paid your bill and haven't used it yet this billing period.  YNAB reports the balance of your credit card account (we'll call this account CREDITCARD), as $0. Every dollar in CHECKING is assigned to a category.  For example, you've got $200 in ""groceries"", $100 in ""fast food"", $300 in ""rent"", $50 in ""phone"", $500 in ""emergency fund"", etc.  If you add up the balance of all of your categories, you'll get $2,000. Let's say that you've written a check to the grocery store for $100.  When you enter this in YNAB, you tell it the name of the store, the account that you paid with (CHECKING), and the category that the expense belongs to (groceries).  The ""groceries"" category balance will go down from $200 to $100, and the CHECKING account balance will go down from $2,000 to $1,900. Now, let's say that you've spent $10 on fast food with your credit card.  When you enter this in YNAB, you tell it the name of the restaurant, the account that you paid with (CREDITCARD), and the category that the expense belongs to (fast food).  YNAB will lower the ""fast food"" category balance from $100 to $90, and your CREDITCARD account balance will go from $0 to $-10. At this point, if you add up all the category balances, you'll get $1,890.  And if you add up your account balances, you'll also get $1,890, because CHECKING has $1,900 and CREDITCARD has $-10.  If you get your checking account bank statement at this time, the account balance of $1,900 should match the statement and you'll see the payment to the grocery store, assuming the check has cleared.  And if the credit card bill comes now, you'll see the fast food purchase and the balance of $-10. When you write a check to pay this credit card bill, you enter this in YNAB as an account transfer of $10 from CHECKING to CREDITCARD.  This transfer does not affect any of your category balances; they remain the same.  But now your CHECKING account balance is down to $1,890, and CREDITCARD is back to $0. This works just as well whether you have one checking account and one credit card, or 2 checking accounts, 2 savings accounts, and 3 credit cards.  When you want to spend some money, you look at your category balance.  If there is money in there, then the money is available to spend somewhere in one of your accounts.  Then you pick an account you want to pay with, and, looking at the account balance, if there isn't enough money in that account to pay it, you just need to move some money from another account into that one, or pick a different account.  When you pay for an expense with a credit card, the money gets deducted from the category balances immediately, and is no longer available to spend on something else." "Journal entry into Books of company: 100 dr. expense a/c 1 200 dr. expense a/c 2 300 dr. expanse a/c 3   //   cr. your name 600 Each expense actually could be a total if you don´t want to itemise, to save time if you totaled them on a paper.  The paper is essentually an invoice. And the recipts are the primary documents. Entry into Your journal: dr. Company name   // cr. cash or bank You want the company to settle at any time the balce is totaled for your name in the company books and the company name in your books.  They should be equal and the payment reverses it.  Or, just partially pay. Company journal: dr. your name  //  cr. cash or bank your journal: dr. cash or bank  // cr. company name Look up ""personal accounts"" for the reasoning. Here is some thing on personal accounts. https://books.google.com/books?id=LhPMCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT4&dq=%22personal+account%22+double+entry&hl=es-419&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22personal%20account%22%20double%20entry&f=false"