How to Keep Track of Holiday Gift Purchases All Year {FREE PRINTABLE}

Wow, can you believe that it’s only a week until Christmas Eve?

By now, most of us are moving out of holiday shopping mode and into holiday wrapping and mailing mode {if you are still in search of a few last-minute gift ideas, you may want to check out my collection of Holiday Gift Guides.

In years past, this would be about the time that I went hunting throughout my house for holiday gifts that I had purchased several months prior (when I came across a great deal or saw the perfect gift for a certain person).

I  spent a crazy amount of time attempting to locate the spots in my home that I thought would be the “perfect hiding place”. The problem was that the hiding places were so good, that even I couldn’t find the gifts!

Even more frustrating were the occasions when I totally forgot that I had even purchased a gift for someone earlier in the year. I would typically find these “surprise” gifts a few months after Christmas!

Kinda ridiculous, don’t you think? I thought so too, so I began to create a system for keeping track of holiday gift purchases.

I created a printable inventory to capture each holiday gift purchase I made throughout the year. Nowadays, I pull out the inventory as soon as I come home with a gift purchase, documenting the following information:

1. What the gift is
2. Who the gift was purchased for
3. The cost of the gift
4. Location of “hiding spot” in the house

Creating this simple system has been a huge lifesaver for me as the holiday season kicks into full gear. I simply pull out my inventory to see where I stand with gift purchases for each person on my list.

Documenting the amount of money I’ve already spent on each gift purchase throughout the year has really helped me to reign in my spending. Before I began tracking the cost of those early purchases, I often failed to take them account when I created my holiday gift budget at the end of November.

If you have kiddos, creating a gift inventory also helps to keep the number of packages under the tree equitable across the kids without having to physically drag out all of the gifts to figure it out (come on parents, we all play that game, right?)

If you don’t already have a system in place for tracking holiday gift purchases, I’d love to share my printable with you. Just click here to download a copy for yourself! If you do have a system, please share with the rest of us.

And if you’re a die-hard paperless person, check out the Sortly app, a tool I’ve used to organize collections! It’s a super useful tool for inventorying items and would be great for creating a digital “where are my holiday gifts stashed in the house?” inventory!

Happy wrapping my fellow elves 🙂