Paper, digital, or both

The obvious answer is digital, and it’s mostly right. Paper fades, gets lost, occupies space and can’t be searched. A folder of files is findable, backed up, and doesn’t disappear when a pipe leaks.

But “digital” hides a decision that matters more than the paper-versus-screen question: what exactly are you keeping? A photograph of a receipt, a searchable document, a row in a spreadsheet and an original supplier PDF are four very different artefacts, and three of them lose something.

What each format actually holds

Paper. The complete original artefact, including things nobody thinks to preserve: the texture that identifies it as thermal, the printing on the reverse, a handwritten annotation, an embossed stamp, a staple joining two pages. Degrades — thermal worst — occupies space, and is findable only by physically going through it.

A photograph. An image of one view of the artefact. Preserves what’s in frame at the resolution you shot it. Silently drops: the reverse side, anything outside the crop, anything the flash blew out or the shadow swallowed, and any legibility that fell below the resolution. Not searchable unless text has been extracted, and extraction is imperfect on faded thermal print in a way that is easy not to notice.

A scan. The same as a photograph with better and more consistent geometry, lighting and resolution. Same omissions apply — a scan of one side is a scan of one side.

An original digital document, such as a supplier’s emailed PDF invoice. The best case, because it isn’t a copy of anything: no resolution ceiling, text already present and searchable, no capture step to get wrong. Wherever a record exists natively in digital form, that version is strictly better than a photograph of a printout of it.

A spreadsheet row. Not a record at all. It’s an index — your own summary of a record, in your own words, with no source artefact behind it. Genuinely useful as a finding aid and worthless as evidence of anything.

The failures of a bad capture

Worth naming because they’re invisible at the time and only surface when you need the thing.

The crop that cut the total off. Extremely common with long till receipts photographed in portrait. The item list is beautiful; the bottom is missing.

The unreadable-but-you-didn’t-check shot. Taken in a dark restaurant, looks fine as a thumbnail, illegible at full size. Nobody zooms in at capture time.

Only one side. Some receipts print terms, a VAT number or the itemisation on the reverse.

The multi-page invoice captured as page one. Because page one has the total on it and looks complete.

The glare. Thermal paper is glossy and a flash reflects straight off it, erasing a band across the middle.

Each of these is a two-second check at capture and a lost record otherwise. The check is: look at the image at full size before the paper goes anywhere.

Why “both” is often the honest answer

Not as a belt-and-braces reflex, but for a specific reason: the paper and the digital copy fail in uncorrelated ways.

Paper is destroyed by fire, flood, moving house, a chemical process it can’t escape, and the general entropy of piles. Digital is destroyed by a drive failure, a lost phone, an account lockout, a sync error that propagates a deletion everywhere, and a format nobody can open in a decade.

Neither failure mode causes the other. Holding both is genuinely more robust than holding either, and the marginal cost of keeping a box of paper you’ve already scanned is close to zero as long as you don’t have to search it.

The version of “both” that works is asymmetric: the digital copy is the working record — the one you search, sort and use — and the paper is a dormant archive, kept in date order in a box, never consulted unless something has gone wrong. Trying to maintain two organised systems is the version that fails, because nobody maintains the second one.

Keep or bin

KEEP OR BIN — formats

  · Original supplier PDF or emailed invoice
                    → KEEP as the primary record. Never
                      print and rescan it.

  · Clear scan or photo, checked at full size
                    → KEEP as the working record.

  · Photo taken but never checked
                    → verify now. Half the failures in
                      this post are invisible until
                      you need the file.

  · The paper, after a verified capture
                    → KEEP in a dormant box, date
                      order, if you have the space.
                      Don't index it twice.

  · A spreadsheet row with no source file
                    → NOT A RECORD. An index. Useful,
                      but it proves nothing on its own.

  · Printout of a digital original
                    → BIN. It's a worse copy of
                      something you already have.

  · Whether digital-only is permitted, and in
    what format
                    → ASK LOCALLY. Format and originals
                      rules are set by your tax
                      authority and vary.

File formats and the long term

A record you can’t open is a record you don’t have, and the horizon here is years rather than months.

The durable choice is boring, widely supported, non-proprietary formats: PDF for documents, JPEG or PNG for images. These are readable by everything and will remain so. The risky choice is anything tied to one application’s internal format, or to a service that stores your records in a proprietary container you can only access through that service.

The test to apply to anything holding your records: can you get all of it out, in a standard format, in one operation, without the service’s cooperation? If not, the records are hostage to a business decision you don’t control. That’s not a prediction about any particular provider; it’s a structural property worth checking.

Backups, briefly

A single copy in cloud storage is not a backup. It’s one copy, in a place that syncs — which means a deletion, a corruption or a compromised account propagates to every device rather than being contained.

The general principle worth applying is multiple copies, in more than one place, with at least one that doesn’t sync automatically. An external drive updated occasionally, or a second service, or the box of paper. What matters is that the copies fail independently.

What this doesn’t settle

Whether you may discard the paper once you’ve scanned it. Whether a photograph is acceptable or whether a scan is required. Whether original documents must be retained in original form for certain record types. Whether digital copies need any particular property — resolution, format, immutability — to be relied on.

All of those are set by whoever makes the rules that apply to you, they vary by jurisdiction and by record type, and this site won’t guess at them. Ask your tax authority or an adviser before binning originals, because that’s the one decision here that can’t be reversed.