With increasing emphasis placed on rapid turnaround time and budgeting of resources, clinical laboratories are having difficulty justifying elaborate and time-consuming anaerobic identification protocols. These concerns, the relative cost of commercial rapid identification kits coupled with variable clinical relevance of the results, and a problem for many laboratories in identifying a Prevotella bivia sent as a recent CAP proficiency sample unknown, motivated development of a simplified flowchart for presumptive identification of anaerobes. Using selective media, special potency disks, colonial and cellular morphology, fluorescence under ultraviolet light, spot indole, catalase, and occasionally other tests, this system allows identification of most clinical isolates to genus and many isolates to species within four days from receipt of the specimen in the laboratory. Use of an anaerobic chamber and PRAS blood agar plates may substantially reduce the time to identification of many isolates, including the Bacteroides fragilis group, which makes up half of most clinical anaerobic isolates. The approach will be presented with a number of examples to illustrate its use.