Ruk's LifeTips, Episode One

As a small shop without administrative staff, the task of handling the bookkeeping for [[Reinvented]] falls to me. I mostly loathe this task, and most of my loathing is due to the seemingly endless stream of brown envelopes the the federal government disgorges at me for various income tax, GST, payroll remittance, statistics keeping and other functions.

I also have a very short administrative memory, and so it always seems like a big surprise to me that I haven’t, say, paid the telephone bill for three months — it seems like just yesterday. It’s been a major accomplishment to have gone a complete year now without any penalties for late payroll remittance payment (they sock it to you hard, with multi-hundred dollar penalties for even being a day late).

In other words, I can use any little edge I can in the war against paper and money, and here’s one of my best edges:

This is my “PAID” rubber stamp. It cost me about $9, and it has a set of rotating month, day and year straps that let any date up to 2013 be dialed in.

Every time I pay a bill or submit a remittance, I dial in the day’s date, stamp the bill PAID, and write in the cheque number of online banking transaction number in the space provided.

This helps me out in a number of ways. First, it’s so much fun to do that I never forget to do it, so every bill gets stamped, and I have a record of every payment. Second, I only need to look at the date on the stamp to know the last date I sat down to “do the bills.” So if I look at the stamp and the date is two months old, I know that there are bills unpaid festering away somewhere.

Stamps like this are cheap, and available almost everywhere. I’m already looking forward to buying another one at the end of 2013.