Digital receipts and the CRA.

Read the current Guide: The Dossier Way

Good news for anyone with a shoebox: the CRA accepts electronic records, including scans and photos of paper receipts — under conditions it spells out in Information Circular IC05-1R1.

What the CRA expects of a digital record

• An accurate and complete reproduction of the original
• Legible — the details must be readable, not a blur of thermal-paper grey
• Producible on request — retrievable and reviewable if the CRA asks

Scan well, once

Thermal receipts fade — sometimes within months. Capturing a receipt the day you get it, flat and well-lit, is the difference between a record and a rectangle. Dossier's scanner auto-crops and deskews, keeps the original image untouched, and stores it with the details that were read from it.

Do I still need the paper?

Cautious answer: keep it where you can. The CRA's imaging rules make a proper electronic image acceptable in most personal-tax situations, but some documents are worth retaining in original form, and requirements differ if records were born digital versus imaged from paper. A folder per tax year in a drawer costs nothing.