How to digitise and store receipts for your business
The shoebox of slips is a liability — half will fade before you ever need them. Going paperless is easy and SARS-friendly when you do it right. Here's how to scan, store and back up your receipts so an audit is a non-event.
- SARS accepts clear digital copies kept legible for the full five years.
- Thermal till slips fade in weeks — capture them while they're still readable.
- Store in folders by year and month, named so they're searchable.
- Keep them in backed-up cloud storage you control — not one phone.
Why paper receipts fail you
Most till slips are printed on thermal paper: heat darkens a chemical coating instead of using ink. That coating fades — sometimes within weeks — when exposed to light, heat, sunlight in a car, or just the friction of a wallet. SARS requires you to keep records for five years, but a thermal slip can be blank long before then. A faded receipt is a deduction you can't prove.
Paper also gets lost, soaked, binned and forgotten. Digitising solves all of it at once: a clear photo or PDF taken today stays exactly as legible in five years.
Does SARS accept digital receipts?
Yes. SARS accepts electronic records as long as they're kept in their original or a faithfully reproduced form, stay complete and legible for the full retention period, and can be produced on request. In practice, a sharp image or PDF of a receipt — stored safely and backed up — is not just acceptable, it's better evidence than a faded original, because it doesn't degrade.
The hardest part of going paperless isn't where you keep files — it's actually capturing every slip in the first place. A perfect folder system you only update at year-end still loses the receipts that faded or vanished in between. The habit that matters is photographing each slip the moment you get it.
How to do it — a simple system
- Capture immediately. Photograph or scan each receipt at the point of purchase, while it's still crisp and in your hand.
- Get a clean image. Good light, flat slip, all four corners and the total in frame. A PDF is ideal for emailed invoices.
- Name it so you can find it. Supplier + date + amount beats "IMG_4821". Searchable names save you at audit time.
- File by year and month. A folder per year, sub-folders per month, keeps thousands of receipts navigable.
- Back it up. Use cloud storage you control (e.g. your own Google Drive), so a lost or stolen phone never means lost records.
A folder structure that scales
| Level | Example |
|---|---|
| Top folder | Business Receipts |
| Year | 2026 |
| Month | 06 — June |
| File | builders-warehouse-2026-06-14.pdf |
This is dull on purpose. Boring, consistent structure is exactly what makes a five-year-old receipt findable in seconds when SARS or your accountant asks.
Pair it with a running total
Storing images is half the value. The other half is knowing what you've spent without opening each file. If your digitising also tots up totals by month, supplier and VAT, your receipts become a live picture of your spending — not just an archive. That's the difference between a folder of pictures and actual bookkeeping.
SlipStack turns digitising into one step: snap a slip, send it on WhatsApp. It reads the supplier, date, amount and VAT, saves both the original image and a PDF into your own Google Drive — organised by year and month automatically — and keeps a live cost dashboard of what you've spent. No app to learn, no folders to maintain, nothing to back up manually. See the expense tracker →
This guide is general information, not tax advice. Record-keeping requirements change — confirm the current rules with SARS or a registered tax practitioner.
Frequently asked
Does SARS accept digital copies of receipts?
Can I throw away the paper receipt after scanning it?
How should I store business receipts digitally?
Why do till slips fade?
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