It was 6:45am this morning and I was heading through Changi Airport to catch a flight to Sydney, feeling a little hungry I stopped by my favorite coffee stand and bought myself an Orange Muffin.
Digging around in my wallet I found the right change and handed it over in exchange for the Muffin and a little slip of paper. I stuffed the little slip of paper in my pocket and headed through security at the gate, ate the muffin, boarded the plane and went to sleep.
A couple of hours later I was woken up by a crumpled piece of paper sticking in my leg.
Pulling it out of my pocket the best I could do was stare at it and think… “why do I need this? when have I ever had to prove to anybody that I ate an Orange Muffin?”
I’m guessing there are two reasons why I was handed the receipt… the primary one is that everybody in Singapore gets a receipt for everything they buy, it is probably a law of one kind or another and vendors probably have no choice.
The second possible scenario is that it keeps the employees of the coffee stand honest. To print a receipt they have to tell the till that I just handed over some money, and once they have done that the accounts are straight and the coffee stand owner has some level of guarantee that his business is collecting its revenue probably, not lining the pockets of of the occasional dishonest employee.
To be fair, as a consumer, neither of those are really of much interest to me. I would much rather know that stores all over the world are not wasting reels and reels of till receipt paper, the majority of which will be dropped directly into a nearby trash can.
Electronic cash payment should mean that we can save the paper, I’ll have an online record of the transaction and as no physical money exchanges hands so it can’t be stolen.
I suspect the real reason why I get handed a receipt is because customers have always been handed one and nobody has taken the time to rethink the value of the process, or how we could do smarter things with today’s technology.
If you have any doubts about my story then ask me about it when you see me next… I can prove I ate an Orange Muffin this morning, and I can prove where I ate it.
I have the documentation and I’d be happy to see it put to good use!
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I’ve always been annoyed by those receipts for trivial purchases at airports. And you’re right, they must insist that the employees give them out, because you can’t just buy a newspaper and leave in some airports without the employee yelling “sir, you forgot your receipt!”
Some businesses have a handy place to throw the receipt away when you get it, but most do not. I’d love to burn the receipt on the spot just to make a statement, but now that they don’t let Bic lighters through security that’s not a realistic option any longer. In my opinion, they’re really taking the fun out of air travel.
I don’t know if I would go that far, there was no fun in air travel in the first place!
I’ve found that the more attention I pay to what happens around me the less sense it all makes. The world seems to be full of people doing what they have always done, very few people seem to question the processes that they’re part of, they just do what they have always done.
In some places where there are sales taxes in the prices, the local law requires that you be given a receipt and there is a problem if that doesn’t happen. Here in many places in Washington State I have asked for receipts and the folks are surprised. The hardest place to get on is at the snack bar of a movie theater. The next hardest was in fast-food places, but now I notice I end up with a receipt on my tray without asking. (Since local sales taxes are once again tax deductable, that may have triggered the change.)
I have selfish reasons though. One is for expense reports (I am one of those accurate to the penney guys) and non-reimbursed business expenses. But I also like to keep track of all expenses , personal and business, and understand what I do with the cash that I take out of the bank from time to time. It is a habit with me, like fastening my seat belt. I find it useful, especially in the current period of belt-tightening. I even always take bus transfers because I write the fare on them and put them in my stash of receipts until I enter the expenses into my personal finance software (Microsoft Money for a long time, though recent “improvements” have been getting in my way).
A good show case is the recently developed interoperable e-invoice system in Brazil. As in Singapore, every commercial transaction in Brazil had to be registered in a paper invoice/receipt, with long description of the transaction and the goods. In many cases these invoices could be 5 to 6 pages long. Currently, 19 states in Brazil adopted a common P2P WEB Services protocol and are authorizing companies to issue electronic invoices instead of paper. The initial savings are estimated to be nearly 500 million sheets of paper per month and the system is still in Beta 2 Phase with a very limited number of companies participating. This is an excellent example how technology may have a tremendous impact in the economy and in the environment.
All fair points Dennis. I guess you are right, part of the answer does come down to personal behavior. I only really track my business expenses to that degree, and I make a point of never claiming anything that I would have bought if I were on my personal time. If eating an Orange Muffin is something that I would have done had I been heading to the coffee stand around the corner from home while on my personal time then I can’t justify that as a business expense when I’m traveling overseas.
That is beside the point though. Given your personal desire to track all expenses wouldn’t you be better off with some form of electronic cash? The transaction should be shipped straight to your online (maybe cloud based) expenses system…. instead of clicking cash or credit you might choose business or personal, ensuring that the transaction is journaled correctly. For those that you label business, it would make sense to be able to apply an account code while at the point of sale, ensuring that the expense is charged back to the right one of your clients.
Cash, receipts, manual payment, risk of theft and corruption, retyping expenses – they all feel like processes that are ready for a rethink to me?
We have a single global network, a well understood set of application and web standards….
Lorenzo’s comment prompted me to remember another scenario that exists in the APAC region, in South Korea if I remember correctly.
Like Singapore every transaction comes with a piece of paper, and I suspect like Singapore issuing it also keeps the employees of the outlet honest.
SK goes one step further though, when you submit your tax return at the end of the year you can also submit your retail receipts, the way it was explained to me suggested that you then got a partial refund on your sales tax for submitting the paperwork you had hung onto.
The benefit to the tax authority is that they now have a rough picture of the trade that the retailer is doing, giving them an opportunity to keep the retailer themselves honest – ensuring that the SK revenue departments collects the right overall sales and corporation tax from outlets in the country.
I still think, even in this scenario, that electronic cash solves a lot of problems.
As a not-that-often business traveler I usually find it hard to remember to hang on to those receipts for expense reports….