Digital Receipts Coming to Your Inbox Soon

How many times have you purchased something and lost your paper receipt somewhere between the checkout register and your car? New solutions are emerging that will offer digital files of your Point of Sale (POS) receipts that you can retrieve now or later via email or Smart Phone. This would come in particularly handy to facilitate an item’s return, exchange or warranty service—or to find that elusive expense-report receipt for your accountant.

As reported in NetBanker, a number of tech firms have developed or soon will launch tools to digitize POS receipts. 

For instance, if you’ve ever purchased something from an Apple store, you may have noticed their use of a mobile scanner at checkout, with the option of having the receipt emailed to you.

Other approaches include centralizing all your transactions via a secure web site (either a retailer’s site or one that aggregates purchases from multiple retailers) that you can visit later as needed.
Intuit QuickReciepts is one example of a tool that collects, stores and organizes your receipts.

ReceiptFree bills itself as the eco-friendly solution to help save the planet, one receipt at a time. It also offers e-coupons to send to your Smart Phone for redemption.

“Lose the Paper,” touts 3SecondReceipts, which focuses on digital receipts for universities, schools and closed communities, and allows users to access one site to see all receipts. Their site promotes how it can save an organization money: “An average university with 30,000 students who all eat at least three times a day must be provided with a paper receipt. Our digital receipt service eliminates the need for that paper, can decrease money spent on printer maintenance and breakages…and speed transaction time at the register to enable more students to be served.”

What does this all mean for consumers and retailers?

NetBanker sums it up best: “Receipt management is a very real pain-point that costs consumers millions of dollars and millions of hours of frustration every year. Financial institutions, retailers, and/or direct online financial management (OFM) providers that solve this problem stand to gain market share and/or profitable fee income.”

Speaking of pain-points, I have to go fill out my monthly expense report. Now where in the world did I file that seminar receipt?