Automation: Taxes and expense tracking for your utility bills:

Ten minutes now saves you a weekend in April Picture next April. You sit down to do your taxes, and the form asks what you spent last year on electricity, trash, water, and gas. Four companies sent you roughly twelve bills each, and all 48 sit scattered through a year of email. Digging them out by hand costs an afternoon, and a missed bill puts a wrong number on your return. Today your bills land in your inbox with everything else. After the work below, each bill files itself into a single tax folder, and year-end reporting means opening that folder and adding up four totals. Build four email rules so every utility bill files itself into one tax folder This takes about ten minutes, once. Find one recent bill email from each company: electricity, trash, water, gas. Create a label (Gmail) or folder (Outlook) named “Taxes 2026.” Build one rule per sender: Gmail: open the bill, click the three dots, choose “Filter messages like these,” then “Create filter,” and check “Apply the label.”…