Bundaberg Now tech guru Geoff Augutis from Queensland Computers suggests ditching the shoe box and using digital receipts instead.
At some point in everyone’s work or personal journey we are taught the importance of keeping receipts for our purchases.
Whether you’re a small business who wants to claim the expense, an employee looking for a reimbursement or just need it for warranty purposes, most of us keep receipts.
While the technology has changed, many of our habits have not. This leads many to still collecting a shoe box full of faded thermal receipts to filter through at tax time.
Not only is this a frustrating chore, we tend to lose and damage the receipts in the process.
So we ask ourselves, in 2019 do we still need to keep paper copies of receipts. The answer quite simply is “no”.
From the perspective of the ATO and almost all modern organisations, a digital receipt is sufficient as proof of expense. This doesn’t even have to be a scanned copy — a photo of a receipt is acceptable as long as it is complete and legible.
This brings us to the next problem which for most of us is the fact that we take photos of these with our smart phones.
We just so happen to also take hundreds or thousands of other photos per year on these devices and it is easy for the good stuff (receipts) to get lost. Fear not, there are some simple ways to get around this.
The easiest one is to email these digital receipts to yourself with a title you will remember and a place of purchase.
This means that you can search for them in times of need. The other option is to always put the same subject line in the email, this means you can use outlook or other apps to filter them into one place for you.
If you have a more sophisticated accounting package like Xero, there are also apps to help you here.
Many packages now offer these apps to scan and save receipts and the smarter ones can read the amount, place of purchase and even recommend an expense account.
We live in a world of convenience. Ditch the shoebox and receipts. If nothing else, your accountant will thank you.
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