Digital receipt
A receipt issued electronically, by email, in an app or pushed from the point of sale, instead of printed on paper.
In short
- It carries the same details as a paper receipt: seller, date, items, taxes and total.
- Tax authorities, including the CRA, accept electronic records that are complete, legible and kept for the required period.
- The best digital receipts arrive as data, not as a photo, so nothing has to be retyped.
A digital receipt is proof of purchase delivered in electronic form. It can be an email from an online store, a receipt in a merchant's app, a PDF attached to a booking confirmation, or a record sent straight from the point-of-sale system to the buyer's account.
Image versus data
Not all digital receipts are equal. A PDF or an email is still a document that someone, or some software, has to read. A receipt delivered as structured data already knows which part is the merchant name, which lines are items and how much tax was charged. That difference decides whether a receipt needs extraction and checking, or can go straight into an expense report or the ledger.
Does it count for tax?
In Canada, the CRA and Revenu Québec accept electronic records in place of paper as long as they are complete, readable and kept for the retention period, generally six years. The same test applies to input tax credit claims: the receipt still needs the supplier's name, the date, the amounts and, above set thresholds, the supplier's GST/HST registration number.
Digital receipts also solve the fading problem. Thermal paper can go blank within a year or two. An electronic record does not.
Worked example
The same lunch, two ways
On paper, a $62.15 client lunch means a thermal slip in a wallet, a photo at month end and someone typing the GST and QST amounts into an expense report. As a digital receipt pushed from the restaurant's point-of-sale system, the same lunch arrives with the merchant, time, items, $2.70 GST and $5.39 QST already filled in, ready to match to the card charge.