Receipt scanning and data storage

[Tim]

On Tue, 2011-01-11 at 10:32 -0700, Linuxguy123 wrote:
> The management of receipts for purchases has become overwhelming here.
>  
> I would like to get a receipt scanner and scan all my receipts and
> destroy the paper copies.

I've had one or two friends mention the same thing, but:

What's going to happen if you need to present your receipt to someone
else to make a claim?  (Refunds, warranties.)  They're not going to
accept your printout.  It'll be a forgery, as far as they're concerned.

Scanning is a slow process.  Much slower than sticking a receipt in a
decent filing system.  I've got nearly twenty years of telephone
receipts in my filing cabinet, and they don't require any technical
management.  Nor do they really take up the amount of room that some
people might claim.  I could quite easily fit twenty years of phone
records, health insurance records, and banking records, all into a box
the size of a normal PC, and have room to spare.

What about back-ups?  More to manage...

The only real benefits I can see from digitising such things are:
Indexing them in a way you can centrally search for them.  Keeping your
own copy of those receipts printed in vanishing ink, or self-destroying
thermal printouts.
-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

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