Receipts

Does the IRS accept scanned receipts for the tax deduction?

Yes, for some time, the IRS has accepted scanned receipts as evidence to support the expense deduction on the annual tax return.

Many taxpayers do not realize it, but it has been accepted since 1997 being the requirements:

· Be an identical copy of the original receipt

· That this includes all the exact information of the original receipt

It is important, however, that scanned copies are organized immediately in the event of an IRS audit. Specifically, records must be able to:

· Index

· Store

· Keep

· Recover

· Play

This means that you should be able to produce a hard copy if requested by the IRS.

I recommend the practice of scanning receipts saving space and paper in the office. If you need to consider making the proper backup to prevent any mishaps that may occur.

There are several cloud saving software and services that can help you with the task, minimizing the work and offering for free the software to be able to scan with the camera of a smartphone the receipt to save, among these are:

One Drive and Office lens:

It is the Microsoft-owned cloud storage service that in its free version offers you 5gb of enough storage for a small business and in the premium 1tb. Office Lens is the free software to scan, which can be downloaded separately or accessed directly from One Drive, by saving the receipt directly in the One Drive folder in a pdf or other file that you choose.

Google Drive:

It's Google's service that allows you to save up to 15Gb of free information to the cloud, shared between the Google drive, Gmail and Photos service. The photo scanning software is integrated into the application giving you the ease of scanning the receipt and being saved in the folder of your choice in a pdf file.

Dropbox:

A Dropbox Basic account is free and includes 2 GB of space. You can also earn more space in your Dropbox Basic account. It offers document scanning integrated in the application which allows you to automatically save and create a pdf file.

Like other ones with the same capabilities, but here select the most well-known ones so far. You can also choose to scan receipts with an office scan that gives you the opportunity to scan more receipts at the same time (recommended that they are the same date) either on the front glass or if it comes equipped with a feeder which is most recommended sheet shb8 1/2 X 11.