Every business owner eventually asks the same three questions: which receipts do I actually need to keep, where do I put them, and when can I finally throw them out? The answers are simpler than the pile on your desk suggests — and the storage method matters more than most people realize, for a physical reason we'll get to.
The baseline is fixed: the CRA requires business records to be kept for six years. In practice, records tied to things that span years — an asset you're depreciating, a loan that runs a decade — need their originating documents kept as long as they're still relevant to a return plus the retention period. When in doubt, keep it; storage is cheap and reconstructing a document years later usually isn't possible.
"Receipts" is shorthand for a wider set. What you're keeping is everything that substantiates the numbers on your returns:
For rental property owners the list has a few extra layers — closing documents, renovation invoices that affect the building's cost — and mishandling them is one of the five bookkeeping mistakes we see most in rental books.
The CRA accepts digital copies, and digital done properly beats paper in every way that matters. "Properly" means two things.
Attached to transactions, not dumped in a folder. A phone full of receipt photos is barely better than the shoebox — findability is the whole game. The right home for a receipt image is attached to its matching transaction in your accounting software, where the receipt capture tools in QuickBooks Online and similar products put it automatically. Six years from now, the question won't be "do I have receipts from 2026?" It'll be "show me the receipt for this transaction" — and the answer should be one click.
Backed up. A record that exists only on one phone or one laptop isn't a record; it's a bet against hardware failure. Cloud-based accounting software handles this by default, which is a quietly excellent argument for it.
Here's the physical reason paper filing fails even when it's diligent: most retail receipts are thermal paper, and thermal print fades. Heat, sunlight, time, the friction of a wallet — give it a couple of years and that fuel receipt is a blank grey slip. A faded receipt is a lost receipt, no matter how carefully it was filed, and the six-year rule outlives thermal ink comfortably. The photo you take on day one is permanent; the paper was never going to be. This is the single best argument for capturing receipts immediately rather than filing them physically and scanning "eventually."
None of this requires discipline in the gritted-teeth sense. It requires one small habit — capture the receipt the day it exists — and one monthly checkpoint: while reconciling, chase down whatever transactions are missing their documents, while the purchase is still recent enough to remember and the duplicate still easy to request. Monthly beats the annual panic on every axis: less time, fewer losses, and a paper trail that's ready if the CRA ever asks. It's a standard part of every month we run for bookkeeping clients.
Keep everything that substantiates your returns, keep it six years, store it digitally attached to transactions, and capture it before the thermal paper fades. If you'd rather have that whole system run for you every month, book a free consultation.
This post is general information, not tax advice for your specific situation.
