I still scan all of my receipts on a flatbed scanner. I’m aware newer technology exists, and I can scan receipts with my phone, but it’s not the same. For one thing, I don’t want a photograph of my receipts, and for another, I want to be able to organize my receipts as I’m scanning them to folders on my computer, not to wherever shit gets saved on my phone. Plus, I want to be able to save multiple receipts as a single file.

I wish we could just be done with paper receipts altogether already. It seems like we should have done away with them at least five years ago, but still, they persist. For a brief period of time, Lowe’s offered an option at checkout to get a paper receipt or have it emailed, but they have since changed it to printed or printed and emailed. At the commercial checkout counters, they still have an email-only option, but the mouth breathers working the registers always skip past it before I can select email.

I absolutely hate scanning my receipts, and so I put it off for months and months, and end up having to spend half a day doing it. I do love being able to search and find receipts on my computer whenever I need them, though, and it makes things so much easier when I do my taxes. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, but this is where we’re at in 2025.

I started scanning all of my papers into my computer back in 2010 when I got my first all-in-one printer. I emptied a four-drawer legal file cabinet, and it felt so liberating that I became addicted to shredding paperwork.

Around that time, I applied for a home loan, and because I’m self-employed, the bank wanted a ridiculous amount of proof that I could pay back the loan. When I say ridiculous, I mean the documents they asked for totaled more than 500 pages. I had them all scanned into my computer, but the bank wanted me to fax them. I called them up and asked if there was some other way I could get the documents to them. They said no. I said, “But it’s more than 500 pages.” They said, “Oh, that’s okay, we don’t mind.”

How gracious, I thought. But I wasn’t thinking about you, I was more concerned about how I was the one who was going to have to stand in front of my fax machine, feeding a ream of paper into it one sheet at a time, but thank you so much for being so cool about it.

Eventually, they agreed to accept an email, and when they received it, they said it looked like someone had photographed all of the documents. Yeah, dumbass, someone did. I hope I live long enough to see the end of the paper receipt.