How to Record All of Your Injury Expenses With Minimal Effort

In order to have any chance of being reimbursed for your injuries, you need to document them properly.

While you and your auto accident attorney will likely discuss pursuing benefits for a variety of things relating to your accident, one of the most important of them is injury expenses. These costs are so essential that they often make up the minimum amount you’d settle for. Of course, you need to document them if you want any chance of being reimbursed. Here’s how to do so with minimal effort.

Obtain a Bill or Receipt For Everything

One of the most inconvenient parts of personal injury lawsuits is going back to various service providers and asking them to dig up your bills. The reason is that they do not take your claim as seriously as you do. They will often delay your request or, if it gets too inconvenient, deny it entirely. The best way to avoid this trap is asking for bills and receipts directly after every purchase you make. This will give you control over your documentation and save you a hassle later on.

Add Those Documents to a Digital Database

There are two reasons why you likely do not want to rely on physical documents alone. The first is pure convenience. At some point, you’ll have to present your bills to your lawyer. When you do, finding them on a computer will be much easier than searching through a folder. The second reason is safety. Documents, and receipts especially, tend to fade over time and become unreadable. Taking a photo of them will give you a file that will never degrade, though you should back your data up onto a cloud service so you don’t lose it.

Be Smart About File Names and Organization

A common mistake people make when uploading files are not changing the file name. The result is a bunch of photos or PDFs that have random strings of numbers or letters as their description. This mistake will make pulling up documents incredibly hard. What you can do to protect yourself against this pitfall is be smart about file names. A few useful pieces of information you should add in are the type of expense, who provided the product or service, and the date you made the purchase. An additional step you can take is organizing all your files into folders based on those same factors: Type of expense, the company that billed you, and date ranges.

Make a Spreadsheet

Those that are proficient with spreadsheet software can go one step farther with their expense recording by making a spreadsheet. Not only will doing so make the data more aesthetic and presentable, but it allows you to utilize the built-in calculator. This function will let you easily add expenses up, categorize them, and more. You can even add your photo and PDF files to this report so that your data is stored all in one place.

One of the critical skills you must utilize in your personal injury lawsuit is organization. Without it, you will forget about certain medical expenses and lessen your future settlement. You can avoid this trap by using the suggestions on this list. Not only will your St. Louis car accident attorney thank you for doing so, but you will significantly improve your chances of obtaining fair compensation.