At Our Office: The Leitz QuickFile Folder

At Our Office:The Leitz QuickFile folder.

A surprisingly simple tool for organizing your taxes.

Doing your taxes is a lot of fun*. There’s the organizing of all your paperwork, the tracking of all your expenses, charitable deductions and investments, and the lingering question of whether or not you will owe money, or get a tax refund.

As stressful as it can be for us, it can be an even more harrowing endeavor for your accountant, whose job it is to take all the disparate information you give them and then organize it all so that they can do the actual work of preparing your tax return.

We’re not afraid to admit we are big office dorks.

We live and breathe this stuff. We use our own products all the time.

And we often look for products that can have lots of great uses.

Which is why today we wanted to talk about the Leitz QuickFile folder (Don’t worry, this comes back to tax season).

Why we love it:

It’s a great way to take all your loose papers and forms and organize them in an orderly way. Think of it as a non-bindered binder.

• It has heavy-duty sectioned folders that can hold lots of loose papers
• It features a great table of contents that are printed on the front of it so you can label each section and keep track of what is put where (We recommend using pencil so that you can erase and re-use)
• It includes a strong elastic strap that keeps your papers together and makes sure nothing gets loose.

As mentioned earlier, we love to find a myriad of ways to use our products, and recently, our company president, Andy Beall, shared that he uses the QuickFile folder for getting his tax documents in order for his C.P.A.

Let’s let Andy tell his story:

“Once upon a time I was getting ready to give my stuff to the accountant, and I had this huge pile of paper I had to give him. It was very disorganized. I had a loose batch of checkbook reports, taxes paid, donations I had made to several charities, a list of my income and a whole lot more. All my different financial information needed to be put into a certain category, and I remember sitting there and wondering how much time my accountant was going to spend organizing all this stuff when all I really want him to do is get to work and figure out my return.

I had been using the QuickFile folders for years for my projects. I liked how I could put the various parts of any project into a specific folder, and keep track of everything. I’ve used them for preparing client meetings and I think it’s a great tool for lawyers when prepping a case. I love my binders, but it is not something that is easily mobile and can just throw into my bag when I am on the go.

It seems obvious now, but I decided to use the QuickFile folder to organize my taxes. I broke all my paperwork into six categories and then filed every piece of paperwork into its proper place. It became a fool-proof system that took a lot of stress out of my wondering if I had taken care of everything, and instead, made it easy to make sure everything was accounted for.

I’ve been using the same folder for years and it has made a world of difference.

Also, my accountant LOVES me.”

Andy utilized the table of contents to break down his taxes into 6 categories:

• Checkbook reports
• Taxes paid
• Charitable donations
• Income
• Interest Expenses
• Investments

Every year come tax time, he simply gets all his paperwork, and files them into the proper folder within those 6 categories.

While your taxes may be different, the bottom line is that the Leitz QuickFile folder is a quick and relatively inexpensive way keep your tax information organized. Especially if your accountant charges you for all the extra time needed to get your paperwork in order.

*Sarcasm intended for the uninitiated.