Bills Spreadsheet

How do you keep track of your bills and their due dates?  For a while now, we have worked off of a spreadsheet that consists of two components.  The bottom half of the spreadsheet lists all of our debtors, the monthly payment and the due date in addition to our monthly income.  This way I have it in black and white what is coming in and what is going out.  This gives me a general idea of how much we have to play with every month and when to fit each bill into the payment schedule.

The payment schedule is the top half of the spreadsheet.  This schedule is basically a repeat of the information down below, except I only list what is actually being paid out.  I do this for every pay day and keep a rotating 6 weeks worth of bills going at all times. 

Keeping this spreadsheet is a great way for us to stay organized and on top of our bills.  If there is an extra bill, I can more easily switch payments around by looking at a glance at the spreadsheet.  When we get paid, I open this document, open up Quicken and then start entering payments into Quicken as I go down the list of everything that needs to be paid. 

By using this method, we haven't missed a payment in a long time.  This system also makes it less intimidating and scary to do the bills because there are usually no surprises.  I know well in advance how much money we're going to have left over each pay day today and I can forecast out how long it will take us to save for the things we want to get. 

Do you have a method to your monthly bill paying duties?  Share!