Receipts & records

A receipt is not paper you keep because a rule says so. It is the answer to a question someone will ask you in two years — the tax office, a bank, a buyer, or you yourself: what was this, what for, and who paid it? A filing system works exactly when it answers that without you.

Scanning is the easy part. Everything after it is harder: the file name is the actual search, because what you look for in two years is rarely the merchant's name but the date, the amount, or the job the receipt belongs to. A folder of numbered scans is an archive nobody uses.

The second hurdle is regularity. A month-end close takes three evenings when it happens once a month, and half an hour when ten minutes happened every week before it. The difference is not diligence — it is that a receipt can only be explained for as long as you still remember what it was about.

The third question is retention: how long, in what form, and who may read it. The periods differ by country and by document type and belong in the individual articles; the transferable rule is that a digitised receipt has to stay unaltered and findable — otherwise it is a picture of a receipt rather than the receipt. The articles in this section work through each of these three questions in turn.