Organization of Medical Bills and Receipts--Looking for Ideas

DEVONthink
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Looking for how others are managing this as I’ve never found a good workflow for managing medical bills, EOBs, and receipts.

  1. For any given date of service, there is likely to be a receipt for a copay with an amount and a Date of Service–at best.

  2. Eventually there is an Explanation of Benefits from Kaiser that outlines coverage and estimated remaining patient responsibility that has patient name, date of service, and a claim number.

  3. There will be a bill if from a non-Kaiser provider, or a monthly statement from Kaiser with the amount due, usually the date of service (which could include multiple dates and multiple patients if more than one of us had a visit the same months), and patient name(s).

  4. Finally, there is the payment receipt that may nave NONE of the above information on it, but will typically be dated within a few days of the statement of bill.

I’m wondering how people are filing things like this so they can find them again–groups? tags? both?

The flow doesn’t necessarily have to be automated (saw this, for example: Classify Outstanding Except for One Case ), but that would be nice.

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I just dump this stuff into one Group. Use search to then find stuff (which frankly is rare as once handled only an exception to go back). Where useful to group rely on Smart groups. When really desperate for structure (which then takes my time to nurture and Iazy and prefer not to do) I put the design into groups with “good” file names.

If you really want to have a structure for Deane’s and folders then no need for DEVONthink really. Do it all in the OS and use Finder as the tool. You can index these OS files if you want searchable in DEVONthink.

1 Like
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Tags for sure (I’m a tagger); Vendor, Budget
I put multiple items into a group, but for an extended medical process I would assign a tag

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  • I have a database in an encrypted sparsebundle disk image (this is pre-DT3).

  • It has one group per debtor, e.g., my VISA company.

  • I file items into each group as I pay a bill, etc.

  • At the end of the year I select those items in the root of the group, and group them. I name this subgroup with that year.

Simple and has worked for me for 8+ years. For example, I could tell you the amount my water bill was in August of 2014 very quickly.

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I had started doing something similar using Hazel’s date match, but never finished and we just have boxes full of medical receipts/bills/etc…thankfully we haven’t had to dispute anything yet, if we did have a dispute arise I’d pick this back up and scan all the content in. Some lazy day I will scan it all so that it is at least digitized and we can ditch the boxes, but I don’t get many lazy days where I want to spend it on this activity.

My scanner scans to a folder (and the document is OCRd by ScanSnap in the process), which would have Hazel rules defined. My proof of concept was for the “import” into DT to be executed by Hazel though and Hazel could add the context. But, you could scan/OCR with DT and then have Hazel re-process it. If you search within the forum you will find a few people have done something similar.