How long should you keep receipts?
The honest answer is that most receipts are worthless within a month, a small number matter for years, and almost nobody sorts them into the right pile. The result is a drawer full of faded paper that is somehow both too much and not enough.
Here is a framework that takes about ten seconds per receipt.
The five categories
1. Throw away almost immediately
Coffee, fuel, groceries, lunch, anything consumable and unremarkable. Once the transaction has cleared on your card statement and you are sure you are not returning it, the receipt has done its job. That is usually a few days to a week.
2. Keep until the return window closes
Clothing, homewares, gifts, anything you might reasonably change your mind about. Keep it for the length of the store's return period, then it becomes category 1. See how long you have to return something for what those windows usually look like.
3. Keep for the life of the warranty
Appliances, electronics, tools, furniture, anything with a manufacturer's warranty. The receipt is your proof of the purchase date, and without it the warranty is much harder to enforce. That means keeping it for one, two, five, or in some cases ten years.
4. Keep for tax and business records
Anything you might deduct, claim, or need to substantiate. Retention periods are set by your tax authority and are longer than most people expect — commonly around six years in Canada and three to seven in the US, depending on circumstances. These are general figures, not advice for your situation; if real money depends on it, ask an accountant.
5. Keep essentially forever
Receipts that establish what something cost or that you own it. Major home improvements and renovations (which can affect capital gains when you sell), jewellery, art, collectibles, and anything you would need to list on an insurance claim. There is no expiry on these — keep them as long as you own the thing, and for a while after.
The home inventory case
This is the category people only discover after a fire, flood or break-in. If you have to make a large insurance claim, the insurer will ask what you owned and what it was worth. Answering "a TV, a decent one" from memory, with the house already gone, is a bad position to be in.
A set of receipt photos with dates and prices is a home inventory that assembles itself, one purchase at a time, without ever being a project you have to sit down and do. And because the copies are in the cloud rather than in a drawer, they survive the event that makes you need them — which paper in a filing cabinet does not.
Paper or digital?
Digital, for almost everything. As covered in the warranty claim guide, thermal receipts fade — often within a year or two, faster in heat or sunlight. A photo taken on the day of purchase is legible forever, is backed up, cannot be lost in a move, and is accepted by most retailers and manufacturers.
Keep the physical copy as well for the few things in category 5, or where a warranty explicitly demands the original. For everything else, the photo is the real record and the paper is a formality.
A rule of thumb
When a receipt is in your hand, ask one question: could this cost me money later if I did not have it?
- No → bin it now.
- Yes, for a few weeks → keep it until the return window closes.
- Yes, for years → photograph it today, while it is still readable, and record what it is proof of.
That third case is the only one that needs a system, and it is a small fraction of the receipts you handle. Which is rather the point: the goal is not to keep everything, it is to keep the right ten percent in a form that still works in five years.
Keepit remembers this so you don't have to
Keep the receipts that matter as photos with their dates attached, and let the rest go in the bin where they belong.
Get Keepit on the App Store →