Archive for ‘Paper Organizing’ Category
Three-By-Three Helps You Stick-It! To the Writing on the Wall
We often carry our must-do information with us, whether in planning binders or smart gadgets. But when we’re at home or in our offices, we need information to catch our attention even when we haven’t thought to go look for it. Instead of our eyeballs going in search of our lists, our lists have to place themselves (with our help) in our eye lines. That’s what our vertical space is all about.
Over the years, we’ve discussed some nifty options for keeping information (schedules, tasks, etc.) in front of our eyeballs without adding to the clutter. Take a peek back in time at:
Paper Doll Sees the Writing on the Wall: Part One — Dazzling With Dry Erase
Paper Doll Sees the Writing on the Wall: Part Two — Chalking It Up
Paper Doll Looks at the Big Picture: Wall Calendars, Planners and Reminders
Paper Doll Says “Stick ‘Em Up” To Stay Organized
We talked about At-A-Glance WallMates™, Idea Paint, Wink (Walls Love Ink), WallPops, and all varieties of chalkboard paint. We got a good sense of how time can be better managed vertically, with calendars and task reminders like NeuYear‘s Seize the Year calendars, Mead’s Organizher line of write-and-wipe items, and PlanetSafe’s Dry Erase Planners. And we saw how some free-form wall stickers, like RE:writes and Martha Stewart Home Office with Avery Adhesive Dry Erase Decals (on opposite ends of the marketing-power continuum), offered options for turning your walls into organizing tools.
Today, we have a new star in the constellation of products that help you keep information up, up and away.
Three by Three, a Seattle-based company, has created a series of space-saving, vertically-arrayed information-bearing products that make Paper Doll almost giddy with delight. Three by Three has designed dry-erase boards and whiteboards using a variety of hearty materials: bamboo, glass, silicone, stainless steel, magnetic elements and more.
The product line that first caught my eye was Stick-It!, featured at the ever-cool Shoebox Dwelling blog, and certainly, the smaller your surroundings (whether at home or at work), the more important it is to keep useful information accessible without wasting minimally-available horizontal space.
Stick-It! products are silicone organizers. Unlike the vast majority of wall-affixed planners and decals, these silicone organizers require no adhesive, no magnets, and no hardware! This means that the Three by Three products are removable, reusable, and won’t scratch or damage your surfaces.
You can attach Three by Three’s silicone, daily, weekly and monthly dry-erase planners to practically any smooth surface, making them equally useful on mirrors in the bathroom (to remind kids of their chores), metal middle-school locker doors (to keep on top of tests and extracurriculars), kitchen (or dorm room) refrigerators (to know who is supposed to be doing what, where), windows and yes, even walls.
Stick-It! Silicone Dry Erase Monthly Planner
The white monthly planner measures 14″ x 9″ and sells for $13.
Stick-It! Silicone Dry Erase Weekly Planner
The 14″ x 3.5″ weekly planner comes in white or spring green, and is available in vertical and horizontal formats. You can also post multiple weekly Stick-It!s side-by-side or “stacked” on your vertical surfaces to give you more visible planning space than on the monthly calendar. They’re priced at $9.
Stick-It! Silicone To-Do Board
Three By Three rounds out the Stick-It! line with a 5″ x 9″ daily/ongoing to-do board that’s lined, so you don’t end up accidentally writing your tasks on an ever-decreasing diagonal angle. (What? Only Paper Doll has trouble writing long lists without a lined surface? Never mind!)
The Stick-It! Silicone To-Do Board has two small hooks embedded at the bottom so that you can keep track of your keys, ID key-card, conference badge lanyard, etc. It sells for $8.
Speaking of conference badges, I think these silicone planners would be particularly useful for business travelers. While family vacations can be free-form, business travel requires careful attention to detail at the very point when you’re likely to be jet-lagged and out of sorts. Pop a weekly version of the silicone Stick-It! in your carry-on and it’s ready to be posted on your hotel room’s bathroom mirror, the back of the door or on the wall above the TV, making it less likely you’ll forget your must-remember tasks until you hit the lobby, the taxi, or the negotiating table.
Stick-It! Silicone Sticky Pads
Finally, the line includes some fun add-ons: small double-sided silicone sticky pads that hold small notes, tiny supplies, stamps and other lightweight items. The sticky pads come in packs of six .8″, 1.2″ and 1.6″ “dots” and are available in white, black, and multicolored (white, black, blue, spring green, pink, and red) selections for $7 per package.
As I noted above, Three by Three’s product range goes far beyond these flexible, silicone boards, and I anticipate we’ll be looking at items like their bamboo channel+panel planner, colorful and magnetic glass planners, and dry-erase stainless entry butler in the future. For now, though, let’s explore all the ways we might use sturdy vertical planning products that require no mounting, no holes in the wall, and no sticky residue left behind. These silicone Stick-It! items seem pretty organized on that point! Please share your ideas below.
Pushing the Envelope: Small Solutions that Stick
Paper cuts. Buzzing mosquitos. Wallace Shawn. Sometimes, it’s the smallest things that are the most annoying. But as Nashville singer/musician (and pal) Andra Moran notes, it’s also the small things for which we can often be the most grateful.
If you’ve ever licked an envelope and then sounded like you just had root canal due to the blech-y taste in your mouth, then you know how important it is to have self-adhesive envelopes, one of the greatest envelope-related inventions of the last century. But y’know what? Sometimes even self-stick envelopes lack the sticktoitiveness (it’s a word! honest!) to get the job done and keep your mailings organized and safe.
Enter: Ampad DoubleSeal, bringing the belt-and-suspenders approach to packaging up your mail.
The DoubleSeal delivers exactly what it says. First, there’s a traditional gummed flap. Lick (or moisten with a sponge or wet napkin, as Paper Doll prefers), and then fold down the flap. Next, there’s a bit of adhesive tape built in to the rear of the envelope, below the flap. Peel the tape off and affix it over the seal of the flap as if it were one of those shiny Hallmark Gold Crown stickers you get when you buy a card. If my description wasn’t exciting enough for you, believe it or not, there’s a video:
There’s not much variety to add spice to your mailing life. The DoubleSeal comes only in one style: 24 lb. White “Wove” (but with a nice privacy design on the interior), 100 to a box. The envelopes are 4 1/8″ x 9 7/8″, making them the same height but a little wider than traditional #10 mailing envelopes. DoubleSeal is available from Staples.
The big question to Paper Doll‘s mind: why use a gummed flap at all? Why not just use an adhesive closure for the flap, just like with Ampad’s #10 peel & stick envelopes?
In addition to organizing the contents of your envelopes, sometimes it can be a relief to organize the envelopes themselves. It’s a petty annoyance, but have you ever noted that boxes of envelopes, particularly oft-used #10 envelopes, tend to topple over, inconveniently? And even if you keep the box on its side in the drawer, cheap envelope boxes tend to open, splaying envelopes across the inside of desk drawers. At a NAPO-Georgia meeting last year, one of our colleagues showcased an interesting little product that solves this problem.
Ascend Mailing Products, designed exclusively for Office Max, has created a book of envelopes!
Accordion-bound and perforated at the top of the flap, Ascend binds 36 “Peel-To-Seal” 24 lb. #10 security envelopes in one little book, keeping your envelopes tidy until you’re ready to use them. Is it the cure for the common cold? No, but it might stop some common cursing in offices where orderliness is preferred.
The book of envelopes doesn’t appear to be sold online at this time, but can still be found in some OfficeMax stores.
From Paper to the Cloud: Ampad Shot Note
For a while, Paper Doll kept getting asked the same question: Paper or Digital? Nowadays, that’s the wrong question. More and more, it’s not a question at all, because the answer is paper and digital. Hybrid solutions are becoming more common because people need to organize their information in multiple ways.
Last year, we looked at the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine. On the outside, it was a cool paper notebook, designed for writing or sketching and helping you look like a hipster, but on the inside, it was magically connected to cyberspace. With the Smart Notebook, you added little stickers next to whatever you created, used your digital device to align and snap a photo, and the picture landed safely in your preferred Evernote folder, tagged appropriately because of each sticker’s flavor of magic fairy dust.
Today’s entry into the paper/cloud hybrid notebook arena, Esselte’s Ampad Shot Note, with the motto “From Handwritten to Handheld,” is a little less hipster than Moleskine and a little more corporate/classroom.
The Basics: Shot Note comes in seven varieties. Four are band-bound at the top, like a typical legal pad. The 5″ x 8″ writing pads are available in wide rule and dot graph formats (suitable for to-do lists and quick thoughts); the 8 1/2″ x 11 3/4″ writing pads also come in wide rule and dot graph (appropriate for class and meeting notes). All pads have a rigid 60 pt chipboard backing and 40 micro-perforated 22 lb. paper sheets. (The pages are not lined or dot-gridded on the reverse sides, unlike with traditional notepads.)
Two of the Shot Notes are spiral-bound for easy flipping of pages, but are also micro-perforated. The 9″ x 12″ blank sketch pad has an extra-sturdy 80 pt chipboard backing so the artist in you can be nimble. Each pad has 40 sheets of 50 lb. paper. The 9 1/2″ x 7 3/4″ writing notebook is medium ruled, with 40 sheets of 22 lb. paper and a rigid 60 pt chipboard backing. The sketch pad has the spiral at the top; the notebook is spiral-bound on the left side.
For a larger canvas to display your brilliance, there’s a 23 1/4″ x by 31″ blank easel pad with 25 perforated, self-adhesive, repositionable sheets of bleed-free 20 lb. paper.
All of the Shot Note varieties have corner markers to help you align the pages (of which, more later). Note, the corner markers are only on the “front” pages, so if you write on the reverse of the sheets, it’s no different from writing on a standard notepad.
Each of the writing pads has markings in the upper right corner so that you can date your notes. (The sketch pads are undated.)
How Shot Note Works:
- Download the free Ampad Shot Note app for iOS or Android.
- Use the notebooks. Write notes, letters, sonnets. Doodle your name and your sweetie’s, or sketch the next architectural wonder.
- Snap a photo of your creation using the Ampad Shot Note app, aligning the four corners of the page with the app’s doohickey for recognizing the corners. This uploads your page to the app.
Name your file. Add a description and tags. The app will create a date- and time-stamp for you.- Access and view the items you’ve captured. Search by name, tag or date/time-stamp.
Share your items via email, Evernote, Dropbox, Twitter or message from your camera roll.
Why You Might Use the Shot Note Pads and App
You, like Paper Doll, may have a really shaky hand when it comes to snapping documents and pictures with a tablet. While an increasing number of digital devices have grid lines built into the camera apps to make it easier to shoot “straight,” some are easier to manage than others.
Your creativity only bursts forth when you set pen (or pencil) to paper. Maybe you get tongue-tied (finger-tied?) when you type, but really need to have a digital copy of what you create so can share with collaborators or clients.
Maybe you want to share a personal message for a love note or “good luck” blurb, and don’t want to sacrifice handwriting and personal doodles just to be able to have it received immediately.
What other things could you do with the Shot Note?
- Archive your children’s school projects and drawings.
- Share notes from class with your study group.
- Snap your grocery list and share it with your family so two (or more) of you can divide up zones of the supermarket and finish faster.
- Keep your originals safe at home (or at the office) when you’re traveling.
For more on how the Shot Note works, check out the spiffy little video.
Paper Doll‘s Thoughts: I was intrigued by the Shot Note when it debuted at the 2013 NAPO Conference last spring. I still think it’s neato, in the abstract, but there are some practical concerns. First, price. Available at Amazon, Staples and other office supply stores, the Shot Note regular pads lists between $6 and $10, which is pretty pricey for so few pages per pad, though Amazon carries them at a significant discount (a more reasonable $2-$4). The easel pad, listing from $70-$90 (yes, really!) and discounted at about half of that, is pretty darned expensive for 25 monster-sized sticky notes.
Beyond price, it’s not clear what the Shot Note can do that’s really special. Right now, it’s a camera app that nicely lines up the pages of utilitarian-looking notepads, and it’s decently integrated with the major productivity tools. But it strikes me that Evernote seems to have gotten much farther with integrating its camera app, and can even search handwriting as if it were text. Then again, Ampad is in the business of paper, not digital manipulation, so maybe it’s not fair to hold the two to the same standards.
I had one other thought. The Shot Note focuses on the written and the visually artistic, but Ampad could create a Shot Note side-spiral notebook of blank sheet music. I suspect that there are suitable apps for taking the uploaded, snapped, handwritten notes and allowing the paper and apps to make beautiful music together. (No charge for the idea, Ampad. Enjoy!)
House of Doolittle: Doing Much for the Environment & Time Management (A Shoplet Review)
Periodically Paper Doll reviews new and established office supplies and accessories through the Shoplet Product Review Program. This week, we’ll be looking at two products from the House of Doolittle.
I must admit, although I’ve written about recycled products many times before, I was unfamiliar with House of Doolittle, a 95-year-old office supply company that makes 100% post-consumer paper products, including desk pads, appointment planners, wall calendars, laminated planners, non-dated planning supplies, and USA and international maps.
In 1988, House of Doolittle made the commitment to produce all of their products from recycled paper and materials, eventually converting to recycled cover materials and book wire, soy inks, and Processed Chlorine Free (PCF) and FSC-certified paper. All House of Doolittle products are manufactured in the United States.
The House of Doolittle Weekly Expense Log Business Planner harkens back to a pre-app era when most professionals kept track of time and tasks using paper planners. Paper Doll, with one foot in the paper realm and the other in cyberspace, still maintains a paper planner, and can see the appeal of having a small, tangible planner where one can quickly schedule appointments, check information and log expenses without need for Wi-Fi or charged batteries.
The Basics: This 7″ x 10″ wire-bound planner uses the two-page-per week style, with Monday through Thursday blocks on the left-side page with lines for 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. standard workday appointments. The right-side page offers the same for Friday through Sunday, as well as a chart for keeping expense records for the week, with columns for Sunday through Saturday and rows for standard travel expenses (like meals, hotel, tips and parking) and typical weekly expenses (like postage, phone, entertainment, auto, gas and miscellaneous). The right-side page also has three small insets at the top, showing monthly calendars for the prior, current and next months.
The black leatherette cover is made of 50% recycled materials; the twin-loop wire binding is made from 90% recycled wire.
The Business Planner doesn’t skimp on extras. Trying hard not to be outdone by the whole of the internet, bonus pages include three-year holiday listings, area codes, time zones, toll-free numbers for airlines, car rental companies and hotels, air and driving mileage distances between major cities, weights and measures, metric conversions, recycling information, monthly birthstones/flowers and an annual anniversary gift list. (Whew!)
The Review: This type of planner is ideal for someone who needs to mark appointments and expenses but has relatively few notes to make regarding either. The space for each day is ample for charting the bare essentials (the who/where/why) of appointments, but with only two small rows for each hour, meeting notes are meant to be taken elsewhere.
Thus, it’s well-designed for what it’s meant to do, but professionals needing more robust planning pages would do well to upgrade from the weekly planner to a daily planner; those wanting House of Doolittle’s environmental commitment but seeking to schedule appointments more frequently than hourly might want to examine their Professional Hardcover Weekly Planner, with time frames on the quarter hour.
As a professional organizer, my biggest concern with the planner was the expense record section. Although the two-page spread for the calendar goes from Monday to Sunday, the expense section runs from Sunday to Saturday. Should the Sunday in the expense planner refer to the expenses from the prior page? Why don’t the days line up? It’s a small issue, and as long as the user sticks to the same recording method all the time, it’s not problematic, but it does seem confusing. Also, as with most paper expense planners, there’s only one slot per expense category per day, so you have to do your math first before recording anything, which may not be preferable.
The Business Planner runs about $17 at Shoplet for an individual planner, and is under $10 if you purchase in bulk.
The House of Doolittle 2014 Calendar is what Paper Doll used to call a desk blotter in ye olden days, and lets you view the whole month at one glance.
The Basics: The 18.5″ x 13″ January to December calendar, designed to be posted on a wall or used as a desk blotter, has a dark blue leatherette top-band and bottom corners to hold the pages in place. Each perforated page identifies the month, has squares for each weekday (Sunday through Saturday) with count-up/count down numbers (so you know you’ve got only 337 more days until 2015!) and twelve tiny monthly calendars at the bottom. There’s a wide section at the far right for jotting down notes, phone numbers and other incidentals.
The 2014 Calendar is made from 100% post-consumer paper and soy inks, and is made entirely in the USA.
The Review: When Paper Doll worked in television programming, having a desk pad calendar was indispensable for viewing the month at one shot and noting important events without having to look up from the desk. I’d forgotten how useful that was until I examined the House of Doolittle 2014 Calendar.
I think this calendar, which is smaller than the typical desk blotter by a handful of inches, would be perfect for kitchen desks, which tend to be cramped, and for students/bedroom desks, to maintain an eagle-eye view of when assignments and tests are scheduled. The only flaw I note is that the smaller pad size means that the squares for each day are reduced, and perhaps a bit cramped for those of us with sprawling handwriting. Nonetheless, it’s a spiffy little calendar for under $9 (under $6 if you buy in bulk).
Both the House of Doolittle Business Planner and 2014 Calendar, and many others HoD products, are available directly from Shoplet, which also maintains a colorful and often goofy blog about office supplies. Shoplet is also an excellent source for business promotional products, including promotional shirts. In addition to selling office supplies in North America, Shoplet is a purveyor of office stationery in the UK.
Disclosure: I received these products for review purposes only, and was given no monetary compensation. The opinions, as always, are my own. (Who else would claim them?) The planner and calendar will be donated to a Chattanooga-area non-profit.
Taxing Conversations (Part 3): Form-Free Organizing
For most people, anticipating tax time falls on a continuum from vague annoyance to full-blown anxiety. Getting organized isn’t a panacea against all that causes us stress, but it can inoculate us against the worst of it. (As Paper Doll always says, organizing can’t prevent catastrophes, but it can help make them less catastrophic.)
In our last two posts, we’ve looked at the basics for getting started organizing for tax time (including making use of the IRS’s new Get Transcript service), and we’ve tried to make some sense out of W-2s and the myriad 1099s and 1098s that organizations and institutions are obligated to provide you.
But what about other documents, the kinds that don’t come on forms? Most will be proof of deductible financial transactions. While some may be provided directly to you at the time (like receipts for deductible expenses), others may be sent as part of correspondence. And, of course, other types of proof will require you do some hunting and gathering.
There are a few main categories to consider.
YOUR HEALTH
You could (and probably should) maintain a folder with the receipts and annotated (paid) statements for all of your family’s out-of-pocket doctor’s visits and other medical care. At the end of the year, flipping through this folder allows you to summarize your medical expenses and determine if you’ve met the IRS threshold for deducting them. If you use a financial dashboard like Mint and are faithful about making sure expenses are assigned to the right categories, you may not have to do any math at all.
For reference, effective this year, you may only deduct medical expenses that exceed 10% of your adjusted gross income. (If you are 65 or older, the old 7.5% applies until 2017.)
If you have health insurance coverage, your company probably creates an annual summary indicating how much health care you’ve used and the amount you paid/owed to medical providers during the course of the year. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield calls theirs a personal health statement.
The trick is that most people have no idea that their insurance companies create these summaries, as they tend not to be mailed to policy holders. Insurers save mailing costs and hope you’ll know to log into your online account to search for your summary. (If your medical expenses for the prior year are too low to qualify to be deductible, just save a PDF of your summary for your records; don’t bother printing.)
If your insurance company doesn’t create annual summaries, you can usually use the “You Owe” column of the Explanation of Benefits (EOB) that your insurer sends after doctor’s visits, hospitalizations and procedures (and you should definitely be able to log in or call to request copies of these, if you’ve discarded them). If your medical expenses are low, no further effort is needed, but if it looks like you’ll be able to take deductions, using your annual summary or EOBs will give you a handle on which receipts or dated statements you’re seeking for tax support.
In the future, try to be vigilant about saving medical expense receipts, as your EOBs and insurance company summaries are not considered proof of what you spent on deductible medical expenses, only indications of what you owed to medical providers. Collect receipts for:
Medical care expenses: Be sure to only count expenses for which you paid and not portions paid by the insurance company or “network savings.” (That’s the amount knocked off the bill simply because you have insurance. If you were uninsured, you’d be charged more than the total paid by you and the insurance company!)
Pharmaceutical expenses: Call or visit your pharmacy to request a printout of all pharmaceutical purchases you made for yourself and your children during the prior tax year. (Because of privacy laws, your spouse may have to make a separate request.) Using only one pharmacy for prescriptions is advantageous.
Health Savings Account documentation: For every qualified medical expense you pay through your health savings account (HSA) or medical savings account (MSA), keep a record of the name and address of each person or company you paid and the amount and date of the payment. Since HSAs can be used to cover everything from orthodontia and acupuncture to durable medical equipment and contact lens solution, be sure to save your receipts, and if a receipt doesn’t clearly describe what you actually purchased, make a note at the top to ease your efforts at tax time.
Medically-necessary travel expenses: If you (or a family member) have conditions that require travel for treatment, you can deduct the travel costs. Keep a paper or digital log of the miles driven and use the current IRS standard mileage rate for medical purposes for 2013 (or 2014).
YOUR HOME
Home purchases: Maintain records regarding the purchase (or sales) documentation for a house, as well as records for closing costs, home inspections, fees paid to real estate agents and any records regarding private mortgage insurance.
Casualty and theft losses require documentation. For thefts, you’ll need to have proof of ownership (that’s why we recommend saving “big ticket” item receipts and videoing a household inventory), proof of theft (usually via a police report) and the date that the item was stolen (to proove it falls in the appropriate tax year).
For proof of loss due to casualty, maintain insurance company confirmation letters regarding the date and cause (ice storm, lightning, fire, auto accident, etc.) of a loss, estimates of original costs and costs of repair/replacement vs. what your insurance company will or will not pay (or has paid), and proof of ownership.
Moving expenses relate to actual costs (movers, truck rental, storage, etc.) and mileage. Did you move more than 50 miles in order to work at a new job/location? Check out IRS Publication 521 regarding what you’ll have to document.
Other home-related paperwork to save include:
- Receipts and records regarding any home improvement efforts you’ve made which materially increase the value of your home (which will have a tax implication when you sell).
- Records of purchases for your primary residence that qualify you for the Energy Star tax credits for the applicable year. This gives you credit for 10-30% of costs for energy-efficient purchases, including biomass stoves, various heating/air conditioning devices, insulation, water heaters and windows and doors, geothermal heat pumps, residential small wind turbines, and more.
YOUR HEART
Childcare/Eldercare costs: To take advantage of the Child and Dependent Care Credit, you’ll need documentation of the name, address, and Tax ID number for any care provider you’ve used for your kids or other dependents. Whether you’re using a babysitter from down the street or employing the services of a daycare facility (for either children or adults), use federal form W-10, Dependent Care Provider’s Identification and Certification.
Even if you’re not planning to run for elected office, be sure you’re not running afoul of Nanny Tax rules regarding FICA (Social Security and Medicare) and FUTA (unemployment insurance). Use a Nanny Tax calculator and keep careful records of what you paid, when, what you withheld and what you submitted to the IRS.
Charitable donations: You may get a nice form letter on a non-profit’s stationery, or they may bury your acknowledgment as tiny text in asterisked comments at the bottom of requests for further donations, so be diligent about opening your mail. A charitable contribution confirmation should include the name of the qualifying charitable organization, a date of donation or at least the date of the acknowledgment (i.e., something to prove the tax year of the donation) and a dollar amount (or a description of materials if an “in-kind” (non-monetary) donation was made).
Not every charity confirms donations in writing. For your protection, keep your own records regarding donations you make. Use the charitable request letter or even a plain piece of paper to mark the date, dollar amount and method by which you paid (check number or credit card name), and file it away. Again, if you use a financial dashboard, identifying all of your donation amounts will be easier. If not, read through your credit card statements and highlight the charitable donations.
YOUR HEAD
Educational expenses: Higher learning can be deducted and the number and type of credits (the Hope Credit, Lifetime Learning Credit, American Opportunity Credit), Savings Bond programs and more can be dizzying. Just be sure that in addition to keeping your 1099-T (for tuition) and 1099-E (for educational interest), maintain transcripts that show your periods of academic enrollment, as well as canceled checks, credit card statements or other receipts that verify the dates of payment and amounts you spent on tuition, books, lab materials, student fees, etc.
Work-related costs: Un-reimbursed employee expenses may include costs for your vehicle or for travel, meals, entertainment or even client gifts. Unfortunately, you have to itemize and not take the Standard Deduction for these to do you any good, and your combined itemized expenses must exceed 2.5% or more of your AGI. Since you have no way of knowing in January what kinds of expenses your employer might force you to rack up in July, start maintaining a folder for these records right away. If you didn’t save receipts during the year, your credit card should provide proof for the largest of the expenses, like airfare and hotel costs.
Proof of payment for jury duty: Yes, it’s your civic duty, and yes, you probably got paid less per day than what you spent at Starbucks to stay awake in the jury box. You might receive a 1099 if you racked up enough days of service, but be sure to keep your own records regarding this kind of payment. If your employers required you to turn your jury duty payments over them, keep records so you can request an adjustment to reduce your AGI.
Tips: If you work in the food industry or a personal service profession where you receive tips, the IRS expects you to keep track of and report what you’ve made. (Yes. Really.) Use a mobile app like TipCounter or Tip Log to record of the tips you took in and what you were required to “tip out” to other support staff members (like bus boys, shampooers, etc.). If you prefer paper, keep a notebook; the IRS form 4070A is pretty clunky.
Self-employed/small business expenses: If you own your own business, you need a unique, separate filing system for all your business-related expenses, including tax paperwork. Check the classic Paper Doll post Organizing Your Tax Paperwork–Part 3: Get Your Business (Receipts) Off The Ground to make sure you capture all the essentials.
I hope this series of Taxing Conversations helps you ramp up your efforts to organize for tax time. Remember, Paper Doll is a professional organizer; in the language of the web, IANAA (I am not an accountant) and IANYA (I am not your accountant). For individual tax-related questions, please contact an authorized tax preparation specialist or financial planner.
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