At my job I am helping to implement a new system that will make expenses flow more smoothly. What we are realizing however is that any employee may get caught up in a random audit at any point in time. If this happens to you, whatever you do not have receipts for will come out of your pocket and you will not get reimbursed for.
There are also so many times in everyday life that I have found myself needing receipts. For a while I used to just throw all of my receipts away and just go with the flow, but I realized how much money that was costing me in the long run.
There are many reasons you should keep your receipts:
Tax Purposes
As I mentioned above, you won’t get your money back if you get caught up in a random audit at your company and don’t have the receipts to back up your spending. Although the chances of you getting caught up in a random audit might be small, if you have over a thousand dollars in expenses and no receipts…you could put yourself out of money that you didn’t have to spend. Also, the IRS is really putting their foot down with expense reports, so random audits are becoming more common.
Food and Gas Receipts
When I go out to dinner or get gas and pay with my credit card, I often find it hard to find a reason to keep my credit card receipt since there is nothing to return. However, I have started keeping my receipts to make sure that the charge that is put on my card actually reflects how much I owed. You don’t want to realize after you have thrown your receipt away that your waiter or waitress gave themselves a bigger tip than what you left them.
Returns/Exchanges
When I used to work in retail, we would not give anyone cash back or put it back on their credit card without the receipt (as is common for many retail stores). Another setback is that if you didn’t have your receipt, even if the product was not on sale, we could only give you back the price that rang up on our registers. This means that you could lose a large portion of what you paid for the purchase (the same goes for exchanges). Without a receipt you also get store credit for purchases, although some people do not mind this if they like the store enough.
Last month I also found keeping my receipts helpful when I had to return a pair of sneakers that had already been worn. I had kept all my receipts from Christmas purchases that had been made and after one of the sneakers I had bought from Nike had gotten a hole in the bottom, I took it back with the receipt and they fully refunded me all of my money…it was great considering they were $120 sneakers!!
It is better to find yourself with too many receipts that you will never need again, than to figure out that you needed a receipt that you threw away last week and now cannot do anything about it.
I find it easy just to keep a letter envelope and put my receipts in it every time I get them. The reason I choose not to keep all of my receipts in my wallet is because I don’t like my wallet getting huge. After a while if I am sick of having all my receipts in there I will just end up throwing them away on impulse (thinking I no longer need them). However, by keeping them in an envelope I don’t even remember I have them all until I take the envelope out again. I typically keep receipts from 6-8 months just to be safe or in case anything comes up.
Once you get into the habit of keeping your receipts it really isn’t a big deal. I know that many people don’t like to keep clutter, but it will really benefit you in the long run or in case an emergency comes up. Check out this Geezeo article for another way to organize your receipts without the hassle of clutter!
Photo: Jane M. Sawyer
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