Receipts ?

[TurboIT]

When retaining receipts for Items purchased such as petrol, equipment etc. Is it necessary to retain the original physical paper or would scanning it in and retaining as a PDF or PNG (etc) be acceptable?

I'm VAT registered as well.

 

[alang23]

Hi
All I can add is that our Accountant wants to see original receipts and that they are available if required. We therefore go to the trouble of keeping them all, even though they take up a lot of storeage space.
We were told that 'original' receipts were our absolute proof of our expenditure and could not be questioned.........whereas photcopies/scanned copies/etc can all be altered or amended.
Regards

 

[TurboIT]

How do you store the paper?

 

[StevensOnln1]

Decent quality scans or photos should be equally acceptable to HMRC rather than having to store lots of small pieces of paper for several years. Some of the cloud based accounting packages have a facility to upload a scan/photo of a receipt and link it against the transaction in the accounts for easy access later.

 

[Scalloway]

From the HMRC website

http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/record-keeping/

HMRC recommend you keep all the original documents you receive. This does not mean you need to keep them on paper. Most records can be scanned and kept electronically on a computer or a storage device such as a CD or memory stick. Make sure that whatever you use to keep records you:

• have both the front and back of documents
• can easily access them so you can pass them to HMRC

 

[alang23]

Hi Conrad

We've got the space, so we have very large stacking plastic boxes. We put the receipts/invoices/docs in those and just stack them. At the end of 7+ years we get rid of everything we don't need. So we have a constant 7 year amount of back up docs available should the necessity arise.
Regards

 

[alang23]

Hi Conrad

I suppose what it comes down to is that I also don't trust Computers.....I am the one that is likely to press the 'delete' button by accident and I end up losing everything !!! Or there may be a virus that destroys everything.

 

[David Griffiths]

We haven't kept paper documents for over a decade. Some have never even existed in paper form.

Storing on computers is actually more secure than keeping paper copies, as you can have multiple versions in different locations, or in the cloud. If our server breaks (as it did last year) we have backups on DVDs, in and out of the office, and backups in the cloud in two different places. You almost certainly willl lose files at some stage, and that's why a good and tested backup system is essential.

If you have paper documents there will only be one copy. If somebody throws out the wrong box, it's gone. If you have a fire or a flood, they are all gone. If you have petrol station receipts or credit card slips, how readable will they be in two years, let alone 6.

 

[MIKE-1]

Electronic storage of documents should be okay