EFTPOS receipt requirements

One of the biggest hassles for business owners at the end of the month is working out your expense claims and what to put against the business and what not to claim.

It can be something of a nightmare and for most, the easiest way round it all is to have a separate card for business expenses.

That’s good but you’ve still got to work through that pile of receipts and line them all up with your diary to figure out just who you bought that coffee for or why you parked in the city on that particular day.

Paypr, from Paymark, can help with that. By digitising the whole chain from EFTPOS terminal to Xero account, users can process their expenses in real time as they are incurred so at the end of the month there’s nothing left to do but celebrate.

One question we hear a lot is about GST receipts. The EFTPOS terminal doesn’t print out a GST receipt, which is why many retailers print an extra receipt (and typically staple the two together right through the information you need for your form) meaning you’ve got twice the receipts to work through.

The good news for those claiming GST is that you don’t need a GST invoice for any amount under $50 (an EFTPOS receipt is sufficient) we even had the IRD give us a product ruling to ensure this was, in fact the case. The better news is that when we were developing Paypr we had a look at the number of transactions under $50 right across our customer base and almost 80% of all transactions are under that threshold.

That means that unless you’re buying something substantial, the odds are most of the time you don’t need to get that extra receipt – the Paypr digital trail is enough to prove your claim.

Let’s face it – in this day and age why on earth are we talking about printing off bits of paper to store your business transactions on? Everything else is digitised and we see no reason not to do the same with receipts, whether they’re direct from the terminal as with Paypr, or stored as a photo of the paper receipt. They prove you’ve made that purchase regardless of the medium they’re stored in.

By moving the receipt process to the digital world, as Paypr does, you avoid all of that mucking about at the end of the month and you can manage your business expenses quicker than the barista makes your coffee.