Command Centre: Wall Files for Papers

Do you have piles of paper on your kitchen counter, dining room table, or in your entryway?

You know the papers I mean? Those things that come in your house every. single. day. Like bills, invitations, and flyers. Or school work, newsletters, and permission forms. Or receipts and coupons.

They’re all things you need to do something with at some point, but not right away.  So you put them in a pile to deal with later. And the pile gets moved a few times because you need the space for something else like cooking or eating.

Then when you need something, you can’t find it and have to scramble around as you’re running out the door.  Or you have to pay late fees because you forgot to pay a bill.  Or you can’t return something because you can’t find the receipt.

Does any of this sound familiar? If you don’t have a solution for dealing with those daily papers, you’ll easily be overwhelmed by it.

Even for professional organizers, the daily accumulation of paper can be a huge challenge.  It just keeps on entering our homes! I’ve switched to electronic versions for a lot of things like bills and statements, so that has helped reduce the papers entering our home substantially. But there are still papers coming in that we need to hang onto for awhile for various reasons.

Here’s a picture of where some of our paperwork used to end up.

And that’s not including the piles of papers that were on our kitchen table or living room table or on the floor near our front door, but trust me, papers were frequently in any or all of those places.

So how can you turn an overwhelming mess of paper into something organized?

This is what I did over 10 years ago and it has really helped me deal with those daily papers.

I am amazed at the difference it’s made in our home! And it’s SO much better than all those piles of papers. I bought clear plastic holders like these {affiliate link} and used some different coloured files.

They hold a lot of papers in a relatively small amount of wall space.

I decided on 6 categories of folders.  I actually just used Post-It notes for labels for a month or two until I decided exactly what I wanted.  That way I could adjust things as we used it and easily add or remove or change categories {which I did!}.

Here’s what I ended up with:

• School – This folder contains any paperwork related to school including things like the current handbook, the most recent newsletter, the current month’s calendar, information about field trips or upcoming events, notices that I need to refer to, etc. You could have a separate folder for each of your kids or for each school. Whatever works best. I found 1 was good enough for the few school papers I needed to store. As more things went digital and my kids got older, there was less to store here. But it’s still our go-to place for anything we need to hang onto for school.
• Activities and Special Events – This is a place for invitations, notices about sports, or registration forms for extra-curricular activities. Any papers that just need a temporary place.
• Receipts – This folder is really a way to help keep our credit card receipts out of sight. So much better than the messy piles they used to cause! {Remember them from that earlier picture?!} I have envelopes inside this folder for each of our credit cards and I shred them once a month after I compare them to the bill. I just keep any for items we’re returning so when we’re ready to go to that store we know where the receipt is. I also keep receipts for larger purchases for a month or two until we know they’re working and then I file those away for warranty purposes.
• Coupons – We’re not huge couponers but we do like to save a bit here and there. Again, these were usually stored haphazardly on that messy shelf. But sometimes they expired because we forgot we had them. Now they all have a home in this folder and I’ve organized them by expiry date. We can still use any of them whenever we want, but at the beginning of the month I’ll pull out the ones that expire that month so we can make sure we use them up. It doesn’t see as much action as it used to because more of our coupons are digital through various apps but it’s still good to have this folder when we need it.
• Loyalty cards – We don’t have a ton of these either but we didn’t really have a good place to keep them so they were in various places around the house. Sometimes we couldn’t find them when we wanted them. But this folder became their a home. And we end up using them more often, which is why we signed up for them in the first place 🙂
• Tickets and gift cards – I keep tickets to upcoming shows or events and vouchers from sites like Groupon so we know where they are when we want to use them. Many are digital now, but we still have some hardcopy tickets we store here until we need them. It’s great having these all together, instead of scattered in various places. Same for gift cards. I keep a list inside the folder with the balances on each gift card so I don’t have to look it up.

So that’s my temporary papers storage system! We’ve been using it for over 10 years and it’s been very helpful. It’s changed slightly in that time, as our needs changed, but it still keeps our temporary papers organized. Everyone knows where everything is. And because I go through these folders about once a month, I remind myself of what’s in them.  

Here’s another look at my files and you can see part of my command centre.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be showing you details about all the bits and pieces of my Command Centre.

If you have lots of temporary papers without “homes”, then spend some time figuring out how you can group them and store them in a way that will help you keep track of them without adding clutter to your home.

If you need other ideas, you can check out some great examples of command centres in this post. I’ve also got lots of inspirational photos on my Entryways, Drop Zones & Command Centres board on Pinterest.

How do you organize the papers that enter your home daily?  

If you need help decluttering or organizing your paperwork, contact me for in-person organizing services in the Mississauga area, or virtual organizing services anywhere else.

Happy organizing!