Organize Receipts {Or Anything Else} With Custom Dividers

I spotted this box at HomeSense last year and it was love at first sight.

The pictures don’t do it justice.

It is a lovely, glossy yellow and white box with hinges. The yellow is the perfect shade that goes wonderfully with all of the other yellow accents in my office.

If we actually had some sunshine that lasted until the afternoon I would be able to show you my beautiful office because now, after a big organizing blitz, it truly is beautiful.

I’m so proud of it.

Everything has a home.

Correction. Everything has a pretty home.

Including my receipts.

I have struggled to maintain a system for storing my necessary receipts for years. I start off well, and then I develop piles. I’ve tried binder clips, accordion files, baskets, file folders etc. but nothing has ever stuck.

I even used this box at one point. . . I just didn’t use it the right way.

A little while ago, I had a receipt organizing epiphany. I do pretty well with maintaining a filing system for everything else, so why not create something that allows me to file my receipts in the same way?

Instead of clipping them together into piles, I needed to be able to flip through my receipts quickly to find what I need.

Also, I wanted a system where I could sort my receipts by the store where I bought something, not by a category.

My first thought was to use a photo storage box from Michaels. They come with dividers, but I wanted the receipts to span the length of the box so I made my own dividers using my Silhouette.

I labelled everything and filled it up with all my receipts.

Definitely an improvement, but to access it I have to pull it out from underneath my desk (I’ll show you that another time). Not very efficient. I saw more piles accumulating in my future.

So, I moved onto Plan B – the yellow box that had sat on my desk for a year without a real purpose.

First, it got a vinyl label to clearly identify its job.

The collage below shows how I planned the placement of my vinyl using painter’s tape and a combination square from Mr. Mechanic’s well-stocked workshop. The combination square is a great way to make sure that your spacing is consistent when transferring an image.

After I peeled off the transfer tape, it looked like this!

Now that the outside of the box was finished, it was time to make some custom dividers!

I originally made dividers using a shape that I bought and modified, but I was not happy with the final layout of the tabs.  This week’s free shape could not have come at a better time! It made the process so much easier.

Basically, I copied the tab overlay from this week’s free shape and pasted it into a new file. Then, I drew a rectangle and sized it to the dimensions of my receipt box (9.5” by 4”). I selected both shapes and aligned them on the left so that when I welded them together the first tab would start at the very edge.

Before welding the tab and rectangle shapes together I duplicated the tab five times to the right and then used the ‘space horizontally’ function to have them overlap slightly across the width of my 9 inch rectangle. The last step was to duplicate the rectangle 5 times. One-by-one I would align the rectangle with the edge of the last tab on the right. Working from left to right, I moved the next tab down slightly to overlap the shapes and then welded the two shapes together.

I did this five times but then I realized that you only have to do it three times! If you look at the image below, I have labelled and colour-coded the dividers to show that when you cut the same shape twice on double-sided paper, you can just flip over divider 1 to create what would be divider 5 and divider 2 becomes divider 4. Make sense?

I chose coordinating scrapbook paper with a postcard/travel theme for my dividers.

In a perfect world, I would have had lots of different yellow patterned paper on hand, but since I didn’t, I opted for a theme instead.

{Does anyone else find it hard to cut up a brand new piece of scrapbook paper?}

I cut three sets of 5 dividers and now I just need to label them and transfer my receipts from the photo box that I gussied up before I realized that this box would be better suited for the job.

I suppose you could also use your sketch pens to label the tabs if you were more patient than me!

If you don’t have a cutting machine, no problem! You could trace or cut down store-bought dividers to make your own filing system to fit any container size.

Is it weird how pleased I am to have a pretty container for filing my receipts? (If your answer is yes . . . don’t answer that!)

 

 

P.S. Since I’m linking up to the Silhouette Organizing Link Party why not also check out my great tip for storing extra die cuts?

 

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I link up at: Serenity Now, I {Heart} Naptime, Under The Table And Dreaming, Nifty Thrifty Things, Simply Klassic Home, Home Stories A to Z, Craftomaniac, Skip To My Lou, Not JUST A Housewife, A Bowl Full Of Lemons, Alderberry Hill, I Should Be Mopping The Floor, A Diamond In The Stuff, Creatively Living, The Winthrop Chronicles, Clean & Scentsible, Oopsey Daisy, Lil’ Luna, Someday Crafts, Live.Laugh.Rowe, The 36th Avenue, aka design, House of Hepworths, 52 Mantels, Thrifty Decorating, Crafty Scrappy Happy, How To Nest For Less, Tatertots & Jello, The Grant Life, It’s Overflowing, Lolly Jane, Too Much Time, Six Sisters’ Stuff, Positively Splendid, My {Re}purposed Life, Unrefined By Design, Dragonfly Designs, Just Us Four, Liz Marie Blog and The Crafted Sparrow

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