What will the approval of digital receipts by the Tax Agency mean?

JOEL VICIENT, founder and CEO of CAPTIO

 

Eliminating paper as much as possible from the company's workflows brings benefits that at this point it is hardly necessary to justify.  The migration to digital is a trend with a long history in the business world. The use of paper as a support for workflows is often related to manual tasks, non-integrated processes, input errors, lack of visibility… In short, negative factors that affect efficiency and control.

Organizations are aware of these problems and have progressively adopted tools and methodologies to move their processes to the digital world as much as possible. However, there are still some strongholds that resist this transformation. Paper still survives in flows with certain characteristics that make it difficult to get rid of it. A clear example is the management of company expenses. Although there are several tools on the market that allow digital management of the process of reporting, validation and reimbursement of expense notes, until recently there was a factor that can be considered external to the company and that prevented the total digitization of the process.

The legal obligation before the fiscal authorities makes it -or made it- necessary, as we will see below, to keep the original justifying document. This implied incorporating the delivery of all receipts and invoices into the expense management flow. All this paper, for the purposes of a possible inspection, was kept in a file. In the event of having to justify an expense, this was the source to consult.

By law, supporting documents must be kept for a period of four years. Again, in this situation, the negative effects of supporting a process on paper come to light. Difficulties in locating a receipt, loss of documents and the impossibility, in the case of receipts, of requesting a copy, originals deteriorated with the passage of time…

The new generation of expense management tools takes a definitive step towards the “depapelization”n” of this process. The current processes of digitalization of documents approved by the Tax Agency allow, now, a total independence from paper. The digitalized receipts with the tools that have the Agency's stamp have the same validity for legal and tax purposes as the originals.

This opens up the possibility of completely dispensing with paper, both for legal and management purposes within the company itself. In terms of benefits: efficiency, control and total peace of mind against any type of audit.