Digital receipts and the ATO: are photos and PDFs accepted?

Yes. The ATO accepts digital receipts — photos of paper receipts, scans, PDFs, and emailed receipts — as written evidence for your tax return. You don't need to keep the paper original once you have a digital copy, provided two conditions are met.

Condition 1: it must be a true and clear copy

The ATO's standard is that an electronic record must be a true and clear reproduction of the original. In practice that means the photo or scan has to show everything the paper showed: supplier name, amount, what was bought, and the dates. A blurry photo where the total is unreadable doesn't substantiate anything; neither does a crop that cuts off the date. (Habits for getting this right on the first shot are in our phone-photo guide.)

Condition 2: it must stay readable for five years

Written evidence has to survive five years from the day you lodge. For digital records that means stored somewhere durable and backed up — a photo that only exists on a phone that gets lost in year two fails the requirement just as surely as a faded receipt. This is also the condition that catches emailed receipts left sitting in the inbox: many of them stop rendering after a couple of years because their images live on the retailer's servers, not in the email.

So can you throw out the paper?

For tax purposes, yes — once you have a true, clear, durable digital copy, the ATO doesn't need the original. It's actually the safer direction: thermal-paper receipts routinely fade to blank well inside the five-year window, so the digital copy will outlive the paper anyway. The one reason to keep some paper is unrelated to tax — a handful of retailers still like originals for warranty claims.

What about the ATO's own app?

The ATO's myDeductions tool (inside the ATO app) is an officially supported way to photograph and store deduction records, so it obviously meets the standard. It has real limitations around single-device, local-only storage — we've compared it in detail — but its existence settles the question of principle: the tax office itself wants you keeping receipts digitally.

The checklist version

• Photos, scans, PDFs, emailed receipts: all accepted.
• Every detail on the original must be legible in the copy.
• The copy must survive, findable and readable, for five years from lodgment.
• Once that's true, the paper can go in the bin.

The Paper Keep is built around exactly these conditions: originals stored untouched, email receipts archived with their images preserved, everything searchable years later. Authoritative source: the ATO's records you need to keep.

This works even better inside The Paper Keep — start a 14-day free trial.