How to organize bills? - 3 ways to track bills easily in 2024
Bills are an inevitable part of life. Whether you’re a business, a freelancer, or a salaried person, you’re bound to have bills. With an overload of bills, you’re bound to lose and forget some.
Efficient bill management starts with better organization, so you never lose an important bill. But how to organize bills efficiently? How to get started? And what are the best practices to track bills easily?
We will discuss three ways to organize your bills so that you always have them handy when you need them.
Why do you need to organize bills?
When you have a single person handling less number of bills, it’s easy to manage. But, as bills increase, errors are bound to happen. Here are some reasons you should take bills management seriously:
Losing track of due dates & amounts: Keeping track of multiple bills, their dates, and amounts is a tedious task. And if you miss the payments, you might have to pay an extra amount.
Damaging Credit Scores: Timely bill payments are linked to your credit score. A dent here can cost you heavily down the line.
Maintaining payment records: For a business, it is crucial to maintain financial records of payments, invoices, bills, and more to remain compliant. During an audit, you must present accurate and reliable data. Missing bills can send a wrong signal and lead to further intense audits.
Inefficient budgeting: Bills give an idea about expense trends and help you keep an eye on your budget vs. your spending. Failing to manage bills can lead to losing track of the budget.
Apart from these, organizing bills can help you tackle identity theft, manage financial records and ensure timely bill payment.
3 ways to organize bills like a pro!
This blog will discuss these three ways to organize your bills. These methods are placed in increasing order of accuracy, efficiency, and reliability.
- Organize bills manually
- Digitizing bills & sorting them on desktop
- Automating bill organization with automated workflows
Organize bills manually
Organizing bills manually involves using paper folders and cabinets to categorize expenses. For instance, you can create a folder labeled "Entertainment Expenses" to store all bills related to entertainment, such as dinners, team outings, and more.
You can follow these steps to organize bills manually:
- Sort your bills by their due date and categorize incoming bills by the spend category.
- Create a filing system for your bills. Use folders or cabinets for every type of category.
- To keep track of payments & due dates, use a paper or excel spreadsheet and write down bill amount, due date, payment status, and category.
- Set up reminders on your mobile device so you don’t forget bill payments.
- Make payments as they come due and update the payment status for each bill.
- Store paid bills in a separate file or archive to keep your active bill tracking sheet manageable.
- Repeat this monthly process to keep your bills organized and under control.
Pros:
- It's a simple method.
- Anyone can follow these steps to maintain bills in one place.
Cons:
- A lot of manual effort is required.
- It is challenging to identify spending trends.
- Receipts can get lost or damaged easily.
Digitizing bills & sorting them digitally
Digitizing bills can help reduce the risk of damaging or losing bills. Follow these steps to organize bills digitally:
- The first step is to digitize bills. You can take photos of your bills using your phone.
- You can also use a bill scanner app to extract data from the bill & digitize bills efficiently.
- Upload the scanned images on your desktop.
- Create folders based on the spend category and upload the bills in designated folders.
- Use a file naming convention to quickly identify each bill, such as the bill type and date.
- Organize the digital bills into subfolders based on categories or due dates.
- You can do this on your desktop or an online system like Google Drive, Sharepoint, or more.
- Now, use a spreadsheet or financial management tools to keep track of bill due dates, payment status, and amounts.
- Set up automatic reminders to ensure timely payment of bills.
- Back up your digital bills to a secure cloud service to protect against data loss.
Pros:
- Easier to categorize and track payments and perform financial analysis.
- Storing bills digitally eliminates the risk of losing or damaging bills.
Cons:
- Storing financial information digitally can raise concerns about data security.
- You need to perform the entire exercise for every new bill that comes in.
- You must create multiple backups to ensure you don’t lose the data.
Automating bill organization with automated workflows
Automated workflows are a great way to eliminate manual tasks in organizing bills. Most bill organization tasks are rule-based, meaning they can be coded easily.
Platforms like Nanonets can help you automate bill organization using no-code workflows, document classifiers, and secure cloud storage. Here is what an automated bill management workflow looks like on Nanonets:
- An incoming bill will be automatically uploaded on Nanonets using document upload options.
- The bill is then routed to the OCR model, where relevant data is extracted, like bill amount, due date, payment address, payment conditions, and more.
- Now multiple things happen in the next stages:
- The bill data is formatted properly if they have any errors. E.g. date format, capitalization, or removing special characters.
- Rename the bill based on bill amount, spend category and more.
- Based on the bill data, the bill is categorized into the proper spending categories.
- An approval workflow is triggered in case of any error, which sends the bills to you for a manual review.
- You can also match the bill data with your bank statement to ensure no extra charges.
- Once everything is done, you can route the bill to the designated folder automatically.
- You can also pay bills automatically using Nanonets’ Flow, a global payment platform.
Pros:
- Error-free and reliable process
- Creates audit trails automatically.
- No risk of losing, damaging, or forgetting a bill to pay on time.
- Automation saves a lot of time, effort, and money.
Cons:
- You’ll have to make a one-time effort to set up workflows. [Our expert team can help you set up workflows.]
Why use Nanonets to organize bills?
Nanonets is an AI-based OCR software with advanced no-code workflow automation and global payments platform. With Nanonets, you can automate any manual process with rule-based workflows.
Nanonets’ OCR software is one of the best in the market. It can extract data from any document; PDFs, images, handwritten documents, excel, word, etc with 95%+ accuracy and 10X faster than the manual method.
Apart from that, you can use Nanonets to extract data from documents, classify documents, use a database to verify documents, perform data enrichment tasks, and export data to different formats and databases.
The possibilities are endless.
Here are some reasons to consider Nanonets:
- Automatically upload documents from multiple sources like Gmail, Drive, SharePoint, desktop, and more.
- Classify incoming documents with a document classifier.
- Excellent document matching for easy document verification.
- Extract data from any document in <15 mins
- Set up custom workflows to perform data enhancement, approval automation, and more.
- Secure document storage and document archiving.
- Seamless integrations to sync data with 5000+ software.
- Completely customizable no-code interface.
- Free migration assistance.
- 7 Day-free trial
- Dedicated customer success manager.
- Role-based access control
- 24x7 support
Here’s a glimpse of what Nanonets can do and more:
- Automated invoice processing
- Accounts Payable Automation
- Extract data from PDF
- Drivers License OCR
- Approval workflow automation
- Extract tables from documents
- Email parsing
Over 30,000 users use Nanonets to automate more than 30Mn document processes. Nanonets is the perfect choice for businesses looking to optimize their document processes with a robust, secure, and no-code platform.
Do you have a specific use case in mind? Reach out to our team so we can help you with your use case.
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