The receipt is not the point. The point is that a receipt is the only artefact that still knows what the transaction was for, and its half-life is about a day.
What decays
A cardholder asked on Tuesday what Monday’s €340 was for answers in four seconds. The same person asked five weeks later opens a calendar, then a mailbox, then asks a colleague. The amount has not changed. What has gone is the context — which client, which project, whether it was the deposit or the balance.
That decay is the cost. Everything else is administration around it.
Where the nine times comes from
Count the people, not the minutes. A receipt collected at issue involves one person for under a minute. A receipt chased in the close involves the cardholder (who reconstructs), their manager (who confirms), and whoever is doing the close (who asked, waited, and then coded it themselves anyway). Three people, several context switches, and a coding decision made by the person furthest from the purchase.
Collect it where the memory is
The only reliable moment is the one where the transaction is still surprising: the notification. A prompt attached to the card authorisation gets a response rate that a month-end email cannot approach, because it arrives while the person is still standing in the shop.
Two things matter more than the reminder cadence:
- Ask for the category at the same time as the receipt. It is the same act of remembering, and splitting it into two requests halves the response rate on both.
- Accept a photograph and move on. A policy that rejects blurry images to protect data quality trades a readable receipt for no receipt.
The exception worth keeping
Some spend genuinely cannot produce a receipt at the time — mileage, per diems, a few subscription renewals. Name those categories in the policy and stop counting them as failures. A compliance number that includes cases that can never comply is a number nobody will act on.
