This year my wife gave birth to two twin boys. I’ve been keeping up with all the bills, EOBs (explanation of benefits), and receipts. Early on this was not a challenge as we got one of each for the individual visits. I date them based on when the appointment happened because insurance tracks everything based of the visit date.
Since the boys and my wife stayed in the hospital multiple days there are many that have multiple dates per each form as the doctor’s office consolidates their invoices. This gets messy trying to keep track of the multiple dates per form when I start my naming with the date.
My normal naming convention is:
20xx/xx/xx [Invoice Type] [Person associated with invoice]
Here is the messy multiple date example:
20xx/xx/xx 20xx/xx/xx 20xx/xx/xx 20xx/xx/xx [Invoice Type] [Person associated with invoice]
One option might be to name the invoices for the first date. Then create (approriately named) aliases for the other dates that link you back to the actual invoice containing the payment details for that date.
Another option would be to duplicate the files rather than create aliases. The obvious down side is that you are duplicating data, but the flip side is, that this is actual data files then and you could more easily use it cross platform if required.
These are not bad ideas but I’m not in love with either. I’m definitely against creating more files so the alias might be a better option. Right now it’s only bothering me when I look at it.
Currently I’ve landed on: XXXX-XX-XX_XX_XX_XX (Year-Month-Day_Day_Day etc.) The only problem I’ve run into is if the months are different on the same bill or receipt.
Not a bad idea. I still haven’t landed on anything I particularly like. My other thought is not to date them (they’re stored in a folder structure 2019 > Receipts) and let the date be searchable by the OCR I’ve done on the page.