Using Omnifocus for Keeping Track of Bills, Good Idea?
 

I'm new to OF and I've applied it to most of my life. I love it. But I'm sure if it can help me with one area of my life. I have more bills to pay each month (my own, plus older parents) than I can keep track of. It's unbelievably stressful.

I was thinking I could use OmniFocus to help me with this problem. But I'd rather hear from someone more advanced or who's tried this before entering all that data and then realizing I'd be better off using something else.

If OmniFocus is the answer, would I be better off creating a folder for all my bills? Or one project listing all my bills? Any other tips?

Other than OF I've considered setting up a 'bills' calendar in iCal. I know some people use iOS apps like billminder, but I'd rather not use something that isn't available for the Mac as well.

Any help would be great and highly appreciated, and if you have another suggestion I'm all ears. The only prerequisites are that it's a digital solution, and available on OS X/iOS.

Thanks!

I used to use OF to list monthly dates when bills can be payed. Then I added these events to Calendar as repeats, that works as well. I now use the app Chronicle which is available on iOS and OSX. I suspect it's like bill minder, which I haven't used. That also works well. At this point I rely on both Calendar and Chronicle.

Absolutely! I have a folder called bills. You can add bills and repeats. Maybe add seperate folder for your bills and for your parents so they all run together.

In addition to tracking bills with OF, I suggest setting up auto-pay for all the bills that support it. :)

Very good hints above.

- If you have good credit and can handle it consider throwing all your bills onto a cash back or points credit card.

- I track the big, important bills in OmniFocus like mortgage and maintenance or things that are yearly that I want to make sure they don't lapse like AAA and taxes.

- I also have put a bunch repeating projects for reconciling my statements in Quicken like Amax, Checkings, Savings, etc.

- These are all tracked in a folder (Area of Focus) called Finances

Jake

Thanks guys! Lots of good suggestions. I guess the best thing to do is try a each and see what works for me.

Thanks again!

I use omnisyncserver and Mail Rules on a desktop Mac to move all bill notices directly out of Mail and into the OF inbox. Looking foreward to the day when it can also set and file by project and context automatically

[QUOTE=Arthaey;118815]In addition to tracking bills with OF, I suggest setting up auto-pay for all the bills that support it. :)[/QUOTE]

I highly suggest not using autopay. I've heard enough stories from people getting stressed over billing errors...when they realize X company has auto-billed them $300 by mistake and now their account is in overdraft..etc. etc.

Better to control your own cash flow then to let some company keep their hand in your wallet/purse.

Keeping track of bill paying is one (of many) critical aspects of how I use OmniFocus.

For that I have two projects:

Finances One-time STL
Finances Repeating STL

(STL = single task list)

This allows me to separate out things like a repeating credit card bill from a one-time plumber bill. I hadn't made that separation initially, but I found it very useful toward being able to quickly and frequently review the One-time list to make sure I wasn't dropping the ball on anything and less frequently review the Repeating list to make sure everything appropriate was on it.

After adding that separation into two single task lists of "One-time" and "Repeating" to my Finances project, I found it so useful that I've extended that to several other STL areas. e.g. Home Maintenance and administrative tasks at work. When I'm getting tasks done the separation doesn't matter, where it helps me hugely is when doing both quick and more in-depth reviews.