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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Digital receipts - I hardly need to carry cash anymore, pretty much everywhere I shop takes chip-n-pin cards so I use my debit card to pay for most things.

However, what you end up with is silly bits of paper that I end up carrying round in my wallet or stuffed into folders at work or at home.

Why can't my payment card contain an identifier that allows the bank to send me a digitally signed receipt - I could get notification by SMS or email that this is in place before I leave the shop.

There is a lot of crypto tech that could be thrown at this problem and it would end up more convenient and better.

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YMMV, but here's what I do:

If it's a personal expense (90% of my purchases) I immediately throw the receipt away.

If it's a business expense, I take a picture on my cellphone, tag it in Evernote, and throw the receipt away. This used to take me about 3 minutes (awkward) but now I can do it while I'm walking, so it adds no time burden to my day.

Receipts of any kind are obsolete, IMHO.

I don't fancy facing auditors or the taxman with a picture of a bit of paper.

Actually, thermal receipts fade over time (often as quickly as 18 months) so a picture is much stronger documentary evidence.

Agreed but they should probably focus on fixing this first: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1118659 (Chip and Pin is Broken)

A potential stopgap to this would be a standardized barcode on printed receipts, which you can scan with your phone and upload to your bank account, import into Mint, Quicken, etc.

Grocery chains / big box stores could add it as part of their rewards points programs. -> Attach email to safeway card. -> Scan safeway card. -> Receive receipts via email.

But this also means replacing hardware, which is a more expensive proposition.

My bank already knows my email address and phone number(s).

I would expect that the easiest way of doing this would be for the banks to handle it all - when I buy something my bank gets a receipt signed by the shop's bank to say that I did buy item X at time Y at location Z. My bank could perhaps then countersign the receipt to link that strongly to my identity.

It would be particularly good if the format included a standard representation of tax paid (VAT etc.) - would make filling out expense claims so much easier.

Actually, shouldn't this be doable entirely in software?

The POS already scans the reward card, the POS talks to a master computer (for inventory reasons), that data gets back to an office which has internet, from which emails could be sent.

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