Coupon Central, Part 2: Entering Coupons

In the last post in this series, I did little more than admit to the world that I have nerdish tendencies when it comes to organizing pieces of paper. I really hate paper for the most part. If it can be on a CD or a thumb drive or the Internet or the laptop's memory, that's where it belongs. My dream is to scan most of my kids' artwork and display it proudly as the wallpaper on the desktop. But I digress.

My distaste for paper doesn't stop when it comes to coupons, but what can you do? I've heard that some stores have this iPod, phone, store membership card, download, coupon thing that is totally electronic. I haven't looked into it. I don't have an iPod or whatever you need, and my phone doesn't connect to the Internet, so I'll stick with paper until I get the concept more. At any rate, pulling out the paper and handing it over still works when it comes to cash and the glossy paper money that comes in the Sunday edition.

BUT, that doesn't mean I'm thrilled with shuffling through wads of paper to find what I need. I do it, but I try to minimize it. So I enter them in my database. Here's the form I use to enter them:

I really do take the whole stack I just clipped and type the relevant information into the laptop before filing them in the accordion folder. I've gotten pretty fast at it. Now all the information I might want to search later is in a table somewhere, and I can bring it up and find what I need. But that's for a later post.