Evan Carmichael shows how to organize receipts in Evernote using stacks and notebooks. He divides business receipts into quarterly notebooks aligned with his fiscal year ending after Q2, and organizes personal receipts by year. The key is a naming system that scales and lets you search across notebooks without creating clutter.
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Hey, it's Evan. Today I'm answering a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Michelle, who wrote in asking about Evernote and how to organize your notebooks and receipts. And this was something that can cause a lot of frustration, a lot of suffering for entrepreneurs. You want the— you want to free up your time and free up the paper and free up all the clutter around your desk. And a great way to do it is to scan everything you have into Evernote. But you have to make sure that then it's easy to find and you can quickly get access to all of the receipts and in a timely manner and create your reports and do all that stuff. It's supposed to save you time, not cost you more time. So the question that came from Michelle was, how would you suggest organizing my 3 areas of receipts? I was thinking to do as follows: personal receipts 2013, personal rentals 2013, personal, uh, or whatever, sand receipts 2013, and then tag it. I need to simplify my notebooks and tags. Any thoughts or ideas? So the one thing that I would think about here— this is a great way to do it, but what I found really helpful is to use your stacks a little bit more, uh, thoroughly. So the challenge that you're going to have here is what happens when you have the next year and the next year and the next year. This might work for one year, but you want to think long term and how are you going to use this for every year that you need to create your receipts and keep track of things for. So I'll show you what I do. I do something very similar, I just use stacks. So the more you use Evernote to keep track of different things in your life, the better you need to organize your notebooks and your stacks so you can find it. Now you can always do a full-text search if you know exactly what you're looking for, but if you're browsing, you need to have a logical and clear way to be able to find all the information you're looking for. So you can see I use Evernote for a lot of stuff, for my book, business notes, personal notes, uh, an investment I've made in the company, my business receipts, family receipts, lots of different stuff that I've used it for. That particular question from Michelle was talking about receipts, so I'll show you how I do it both on a personal level and a business level. So I keep track of business receipts here, and you can see how I've done it. And what I typically do is I have my stack that's called business receipts, and then I have notebooks for half the year. So my year-end is actually in the middle of the year, it's the end of the second quarter. So I'll keep track of my receipts from first and second quarter, and then later in the year, third and fourth quarter, first and second quarter, third and fourth quarter. Instead of just doing the whole year, I break it down by quarter because my year-end's in the middle. So it's easy for me to find information and the cutoff point that my accountant needs for all his stuff. So that's how I do it. And then within here, if I click, I can see all of the individual receipts that I have collected. I do something similar on family receipts. You can see here I just do this by the year since I'm just keeping track for personal reasons, not for any business reasons. I don't have a personal year-end that I need to worry about, so I just keep track and scan them all in here. So your, your approach is great, uh, it's, it's good to clearly label what each one is going to be. Your challenge is going to be as you get into more years, so think beyond 2013 and go 14, 15, 16, and so on, you want to be able to quickly find those receipts, uh, and in a logical way. If you are just filled with tons of notebooks and no logical way to organize them, then you could be quickly drowning in trying to find out the right information. So again, the, the simple answer here is to create a stack So all of these similar notebooks are all about business receipts. So the— in your question here, you're talking about personal receipts, rental receipts, and whatever the SAND receipts are. So those would all be notebooks, but within a stack. So I would have a stack called personal receipts, and in 2013, '14, '15, '16, do it again for personal receipts, do it again for your rentals, do it again for SAND. So each one has its own stack, and then the notebooks are specific to the year. So that's how I've done it. I found it super helpful. If I need to browse, it's easy to go through and find it. And if I need to do a search because I'm looking for something in, in particular, I can always do my search either on the specific notebook, on the stack, or on everything that I have included. Hopefully that helps. If you guys like this video, give it a thumbs up below. Let me know you liked it. I'd love to hear what you have to think. You have a question about Evernote, you have a different way to solve it, leave it in the comments below. If you have a different question about your business, I'd love to hear from you and I'll make a video response. Thank you so much and I'll see you soon.
