Somebody needs the receipt for a thing you bought in March last year. You find it. It is a strip of thermal paper, and it is blank — not faded, blank, the way they go when they’ve been in a wallet next to a phone for a summer.
Or you find it and it’s perfectly legible: £48.60, a date, a card ending 4417, and the vendor’s name, which is a holding company you have never heard of and which tells you nothing about what you bought.
Or you don’t find it, because it is somewhere in nine thousand photos, filed under IMG_4471.
Those are the three failures, and they are all failures of practice rather than of tooling. The paper had a chemistry problem, the record was missing the only field that mattered, and the file had no name. No scanner fixes any of them, which is why this site doesn’t talk about scanners.
What it talks about instead: what a record has to carry to still be worth something in two years, why thermal receipts go blank and what actually accelerates it, what a scan preserves and what it silently drops, how to build a retention scheme when the retention period isn’t yours to decide, and the unglamorous business of naming things so that future you can find them in under a minute.
One boundary, stated once and meant: nothing here is tax or legal advice. How long you’re required to keep anything, and what your tax authority will accept, depends on where you are and what you do. This site is about holding records well. What the rules are is a question for whoever actually decides them.
Latest posts
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What makes a receipt useful later
Six fields decide whether a record is worth anything in two years. Five are printed for you. The one that matters most is never on the paper.
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Why thermal receipts fade
There is no ink. The image is a chemical reaction in a coating, and it can be undone by heat, light, friction, solvents and ordinary plastic.
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Paper, digital, or both
A scan is a photograph of the information, not the information. Knowing what each format preserves and silently drops decides which one you need.
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How long to keep things
This site won't tell you the number, because it isn't one number. What it can give you is a scheme that works whatever the number turns out to be.
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Finding it again
Storage is solved and retrieval isn't. Filenames, dates and one flat folder will beat any hierarchy you design, because you won't maintain the hierarchy.