What receipts do I need to keep for my business taxes?

Why a credit card or bank statement is not enough

A credit card statement shows that money left your account and which vendor received it, but it does not show what you actually bought. The CRA's documentary requirement for an input tax credit or a business expense deduction is the actual receipt or invoice: the vendor's name, the date, a description of what was purchased, and the GST/HST charged if you are claiming it back. A bank line item that just names the store proves a payment happened, not what it was for.

This gap matters most at year-end or in a review, when a bookkeeper or the CRA is trying to reconstruct months of spending from statements alone. Without the underlying receipt, a legitimate business expense can be denied simply because there is nothing to show it was business-related rather than personal.

The same rule applies to online purchases and subscriptions, where the "receipt" is often just an emailed order confirmation or an invoice attached to a payment notification rather than anything mailed or handed to you. Save that confirmation the moment it arrives, since many vendors do not keep a searchable purchase history available indefinitely, and a cancelled subscription can make an old invoice difficult or impossible to retrieve months later. Forwarding order confirmations straight into a dedicated folder or a receipt-capture inbox as they land is a small habit that avoids that scramble entirely.

Meals and entertainment: what the receipt needs to show

A meal receipt on its own is not sufficient documentation for a business meal deduction. The CRA expects you to also be able to show who attended and the business purpose of the meal, since only fifty percent of most business meal and entertainment costs are deductible in the first place, and the whole claim depends on it genuinely being a business expense rather than a personal one. A quick note on the receipt or in your expense app — the client's name and what was discussed — is usually enough, but it needs to exist somewhere. The same principle extends to gifts and small client-appreciation purchases: a receipt without any note on the business purpose leaves the deduction resting entirely on your memory months or years later.

Vehicle expenses need a mileage log

Claiming vehicle expenses for business use requires more than fuel and repair receipts; the CRA also expects a mileage log that tracks business kilometres driven against total kilometres for the year, since the deduction is based on the business-use percentage of the vehicle. Our page on tracking vehicle mileage for the CRA covers what a log needs to include and how to keep it without it becoming a daily chore.

Beyond the log itself, keep the actual receipts for fuel, insurance, maintenance, and any lease or loan payments, since the business-use percentage from the log gets applied against these real costs rather than against an estimated flat rate. A mileage log with no receipts behind it, or a pile of vehicle receipts with no log showing the business-use percentage, are each only half of what the CRA expects to see.

Home office claims need the underlying bills

A home office deduction is based on the percentage of your home used for business, applied to actual costs like utilities, rent, or a portion of your mortgage interest and property tax. That means the supporting documents are your utility bills, rent receipts, or mortgage statements, not a single number you estimate at tax time. Keep the bills for the full year even if you only calculate the claim once, since the CRA can ask to see what the percentage was applied to.

Keep a record of how the square-footage percentage itself was calculated too, not just the bills it gets applied to. A floor plan, a set of measurements, or even a dated photo showing the space used for the business is worth keeping alongside the utility bills, since the percentage is the part of the claim most likely to be questioned if the deduction is ever reviewed.

What happens without them, and how we build receipt capture in

When the CRA reviews a return and asks for backup, missing receipts generally mean the related expense or input tax credit gets denied, even if the expense was genuinely for the business. The CRA is not required to accept a credible explanation in place of documentation, and a pattern of missing receipts across many transactions can also prompt a broader look at the rest of the return, since a reviewer who finds one category poorly supported has reason to check whether the rest of the return holds up the same way. Our page on how long to keep business records covers the retention period once you have the receipt in hand.

We set clients up with a digital capture tool such as Dext as part of our bookkeeping services, so a receipt gets photographed and filed the moment it is generated, rather than collected in a shoebox and sorted months later. That habit is what actually protects a business in a review: the receipt exists, it is legible, and it is already matched to the transaction in the books instead of being reconstructed from memory. Clients who adopt this early, rather than after a review has already started, spend a fraction of the time at tax season that a shoebox-and-hope approach usually costs.

Source: CRA — Keeping records.