What receipts to keep

The short answer is "all of them," which is useless advice. The useful version is knowing which ones you are most likely to lose, because those are the ones worth building a habit around.

This is a recordkeeping post. It does not say what is deductible — that is a conversation for a tax professional. It says which paper tends to survive and which tends to vanish.

The ones you already keep

Some records look after themselves, and it is worth naming them so you can stop worrying about them:

• Major repairs. Large, memorable, and accompanied by a proper printed invoice that usually goes straight into a folder.
• Tires. Same story — infrequent, expensive, properly documented.
• Permits and licences. Official paperwork, treated as important because it obviously is.
• Anything financed. There is a contract and a counterparty who also holds a copy.

These are not where the problem lives. Notice the pattern: big amount, infrequent, proper invoice, obviously significant. Every attribute that makes a record survive.

The ones that disappear

Now invert every one of those attributes and you have the list of what actually goes missing:

Fuel

The largest total of the year, made up of individually unremarkable transactions, printed on thermal paper, handed to you outdoors while you are in a hurry. Every risk factor at once. The single most important record to capture immediately.

Tolls

Small enough individually to feel not worth the effort. Where a transponder account produces a statement, you have a durable record. Where you paid cash, the slip is the only evidence that will ever exist.

Scale tickets

Thermal, small, and handled at exactly the moment you have least attention to spare. Covered in more detail in scale tickets and lumper fees.

Lumper fees

Frequently cash, sometimes with no receipt offered at all unless you ask. The hardest record in the whole job to hold on to.

Showers and parking

Individually trivial, which is precisely why nobody keeps them, and collectively meaningful over fifty weeks. The arithmetic is the argument: a small amount several times a week for a year is not small.

Truck stop supplies

Gloves, straps, cleaning supplies, a replacement cable, a bulb. Bought alongside other things, often on the same transaction as fuel and a meal — which is why the card statement is not a substitute for the receipt. The statement shows one total to one merchant and cannot separate the three.

Roadside and emergency spending

Bought under pressure, at odd hours, when documentation is the last thing on your mind. Also frequently the largest unplanned amounts of the year.

The pattern worth internalising

Every record that goes missing shares the same profile: small enough to feel unimportant, frequent enough to add up, printed on paper that degrades, and received at a moment when you are busy.

That is not a memory problem or a discipline problem. It is a design problem — the moment a receipt is generated is systematically the worst possible moment to ask someone to file it carefully.

Which is why "be more organised" fails as advice, and why the only thing that works is making capture fast enough to happen at the counter. Three seconds is a habit. Anything longer competes with the job.

What about the digital ones

Increasingly some of this arrives as email or in an app — toll accounts, app-based parking, invoices from shops that have gone paperless. Those are more durable than thermal paper, but they introduce the other failure mode: fragmentation.

A record you cannot find is not meaningfully different from a record you do not have. If the fuel receipts are in one place and the toll statements are in an email account and the parking is in three different apps, then at the end of the year you cannot tell what is missing, because you have no single place where its absence would be visible.

Getting everything into one destination matters roughly as much as capturing it in the first place.

The short version

Capture everything, but if you are building the habit one step at a time, start with fuel — biggest total, most frequent, worst paper. Then the small stuff nobody keeps, because that is where the quiet losses are. The big invoices will keep looking after themselves.

For how long any of it needs to survive afterwards, see how long to keep tax records.

CabSnap is a receipt capture and recordkeeping tool. It is not a tax preparation service and does not provide tax, legal, or accounting advice. Consult a qualified tax professional about your own circumstances.