Receipts are the proof behind every business expense you deduct, and the shoebox is still the most common system. Here is what you actually have to keep, for how long, and a way to do it on your iPhone that does not involve sending photos of your spending to a company’s server.
What a receipt has to show
For an expense to be supported, the record needs the amount, the date, the place, and what the money was for. A printed receipt carries the first three; the business purpose is the part you add, and a one-line note at the time (“printer paper for the studio”) is enough. For meals and travel the rules are stricter: who was there and the business reason.
The IRS generally does not require a receipt for an expense under $75, other than lodging, if the rest of the record exists. In practice, keep them all. The question is never whether you had too many receipts.
How long to keep them
Keep records for three years after the date you filed the return they support. The window stretches to six years if income was underreported by more than a quarter, and records for property you depreciate are kept until three years after the year you dispose of it. Paper fades; thermal receipts can be blank inside a year. A photo taken the day you got it, with the date on it, is the version that will still be readable.
A system that takes ten seconds at the register
- Photograph the receipt when it is handed to you, before it goes in a pocket.
- Let the phone read the store, date, total and items off the photo, and check the total.
- Put it in a category and, for anything that needs it, add the one-line purpose.
- At tax time, export the year as a PDF or spreadsheet by category and hand it over.
Everything else, the sorting by month, the totals by category, the search for “what did I spend on software”, falls out of step 2 having happened.
Why “nothing uploaded” is the feature to look for
Most receipt apps work by uploading the photo to a server, running the text recognition there, and keeping a copy. That is a complete record of where you shop, what you buy, what you pay with and when, held by a company whose business model is often built on that data or on the subscription that gives you access to your own records. If you stop paying, the archive can go with it.
iPhones have had on-device text recognition for years. A receipt app does not need a server to read a receipt; it needs one to keep you.
Receiptless does it on the phone
Receiptless reads the receipt with iOS’s own text recognition inside the app: the store, the date, the total, every line item, the tax and tip, the card you paid with. You see the result before anything is saved. It has no server, no account, no analytics and makes no network requests of its own. The App Store privacy label says Data Not Collected because that is true.
- Snap it: tap +, take the photo, check, save.
- Let it spot them: turn on photo spotting and receipts already in your camera roll line up ready to file. One tap files them all.
- Share it in: a PDF receipt from an email, or a screenshot from Safari, shared to Receiptless is read the same way.
- Get it out: PDF or CSV for any date range, photos included if you want them, through the normal share sheet.
All of that is free, with no receipt limit and no time limit. The one purchase, Tax Pro at $19.99 once, is for business driving: unlimited automatic trips, the IRS mileage log and a Schedule C pack.
Get Receiptless free on the App Store →
This page is general information, not tax advice; check with your preparer. More: Schedule C mileage deduction · IRS mileage rate 2026 · mileage deduction calculator · the best mileage tracker apps · Receiptless