VAT invoices and receipts: what to keep and why

Three emails arrive after you buy something online. The first says your order has been received. The second says your card has been charged. The third, usually later and usually somewhere else entirely, is the VAT invoice. All three show the same amount. All three carry the supplier's name. Only the third one lets a VAT-registered business reclaim the VAT.

Almost every business owner gets this wrong at some point, and the confusion is built into the way suppliers send things out rather than into the person filing them. Nobody is asked, at the moment of buying a train ticket or renewing a software subscription, to think about which of three near identical emails is the tax document.

Here is the difference in plain terms, where the real invoice hides both online and in a shop, and what HMRC actually asks you to keep.

The three documents, and what each one proves

An order confirmation is sent the moment you place the order. It records what you asked for. At that point the supplier may not have taken the money, may not have shipped anything and may still cancel. It proves the intention to buy.

A payment confirmation comes from the supplier or from whoever processed the card, such as PayPal, Stripe or Apple. It records that money moved. It proves the payment left the account.

A VAT invoice is the supplier's formal tax document. It is the only one of the three that states how much of what you paid was VAT, and it carries the supplier's VAT registration number so that the amount can be traced back to a business that has accounted for it.

One useful thing to know: the label at the top is not the test. Some suppliers send an order confirmation that happens to contain everything a VAT invoice needs, in which case it is a VAT invoice whatever it calls itself. Others send something headed "Invoice" that is missing the VAT number. What counts is the detail on the page.

What makes a VAT invoice a VAT invoice

HMRC sets out what has to be on one. A full VAT invoice shows a unique sequential number, the date of issue, the tax point, the supplier's name, address and VAT registration number, the customer's name and address, a description of what was supplied, the quantity, the unit price, the rate of VAT, the amount payable excluding VAT and the total VAT in sterling.

For anything up to £250 including VAT, a supplier can issue a simplified invoice instead. That one is shorter: their name, address and VAT number, the time of supply, a description of what was bought and, for each VAT rate, the total including VAT along with the rate charged. A till receipt from a VAT-registered shop is usually a simplified VAT invoice, which is why the small ones are often fine as they come. The slip from the card machine is a different thing entirely, and there is a section on that below.

The rule that catches people is stated plainly on GOV.UK: you cannot reclaim VAT using an invalid invoice, a pro-forma invoice, a statement or a delivery note. A bank statement is a statement. A card payment confirmation is closer to a statement than to an invoice. Neither one will support the claim, however clearly it shows the money going out.

If you are not VAT registered, none of this section applies to you yet. You still keep the paperwork, for the reasons in the next section, and the VAT question simply is not live.

And if an invoice has genuinely vanished, the situation is not hopeless. HMRC has discretion under Regulation 29 of the VAT Regulations 1995 to accept alternative evidence, and its own guidance tells staff not to refuse a claim without giving that evidence reasonable consideration. It is worth knowing about. It is not worth planning around, because the same guidance says the discretion is for exceptional circumstances and a business that routinely turns up without invoices can expect the claim to be disallowed.

Keep the order confirmation anyway

Whether you can reclaim the VAT is one question. Whether the cost belongs to the business at all is a completely different question, and an order confirmation answers that one well.

For a sole trader's profit or a company's corporation tax, what matters is that the expense was real and was for the business. An order confirmation showing the date, the supplier, the item and the amount does that job. HMRC's own list of records for the self-employed includes receipts for goods and stock, bank statements, chequebook stubs, sales invoices, till rolls and bank slips. It is a broad list on purpose.

So nothing is wasted by keeping it. File the order confirmation, note that the VAT invoice is still outstanding and chase it when you have a moment. Order confirmations often carry a line by line description that the invoice leaves out, which is exactly what you want in twelve months when somebody asks what that payment was for.

Where the real VAT invoice usually hides

Most online suppliers do issue one. They just do not send it attached to the email you were expecting.

Rail operators send a booking confirmation, which is not a VAT invoice. Worth knowing as well: UK rail fares are zero rated for VAT, because passenger transport in a vehicle with ten or more seats is zero rated, so there is usually no VAT on the fare to reclaim in the first place. Things bought alongside it, such as station car parking or food on board, are usually standard rated and do carry VAT.
Apple keeps purchase history in the account settings rather than in the email, and every order in there has its own invoice.
Amazon puts a download invoice option against each order under Your Orders. The common gap is marketplace sellers, some of whom are not VAT registered and so will never issue one, which is a legitimate answer rather than an oversight.
Software subscriptions almost all have a billing page with an invoice history, and most will email invoices automatically to an address you nominate, which removes the task permanently for the price of setting it up once.
Hotels have the booking site send a reservation confirmation, then issue the VAT invoice themselves at checkout, so ask for it in the name of the business while you are standing at the desk.

The habit worth building is small. At the point of buying, spend two minutes looking for the words billing, invoices, purchase history or download invoice. Two minutes then saves an hour of archaeology nine months later, when the supplier's login has changed and nobody remembers which card was used.

In person, the card machine slip is not the receipt

This is the same problem standing at a counter, and it catches people more often than the online version does, because there is no account area to go back to afterwards.

When you pay by card in a shop, the card machine prints a slip showing the amount, the last four digits of the card, the date and the merchant name. That slip is a payment confirmation. It belongs in exactly the same category as the payment email from an online supplier, and for the same reason: no VAT number, no VAT breakdown, so it will not support a reclaim.

The document you want is the till receipt, which is a different piece of paper from a different machine. For a VAT-registered retailer, a till receipt for £250 or less is usually a simplified VAT invoice, carrying the shop's VAT number, a description of what was bought and, for each VAT rate, the total including VAT along with the rate charged.

Here is the part that makes this feel less like bad service. A retailer does not have to give you a VAT invoice unless you ask for one. The VAT Regulations say a retailer is not required to provide a VAT invoice except at the request of a customer who is a taxable person, which in plain terms means a VAT-registered business. So a shop handing over the card slip and nothing else is following the default rather than being unhelpful. The VAT invoice is a thing you request.

Three things follow from that:

Ask while you are still at the counter, because that is the moment it costs nothing. "Can I have a VAT receipt please" is the phrase, and most staff recognise it straight away.
Above £250 you need a full VAT invoice, which has to carry your business name and address, so the shop needs those from you. Worth having them somewhere easy to read out before you buy anything substantial.
Some shops will never issue one, because a business under the £90,000 registration threshold is not VAT registered and charges no VAT in the first place. There is nothing to reclaim and nothing to chase, so this one is genuinely fine.

If the card slip is already all you have, going back with it usually works, since most tills can find the transaction and reprint. Plenty of retailers will also email a receipt if you have an account with them.

There is one relief for very small amounts, and it is worth knowing exactly how narrow it is, because it gets quoted far more broadly than it reads. For four specific types of supply you do not need a VAT invoice where the total for each one was £25 or less including VAT, as long as you are sure the supplier was VAT registered. The four are phone calls from public or private phones, purchases through coin-operated machines, car park charges and a single or return toll paid at the tollbooth. That is the whole list. It does not cover a coffee, a taxi fare or anything bought in a shop, so for all of those the answer is still to ask at the time.

Two details sit inside that relief and both are easy to miss. On-street parking meters are not subject to VAT at all, so there is nothing there to reclaim in the first place. And if you buy a book of toll tickets, or use a tolled road or crossing on an account or an electronic tag, you need a proper VAT invoice whatever each individual journey cost.

One note on supermarkets, since they are where most mixed receipts come from. Most food for human consumption is zero rated, with standard-rated exceptions including hot takeaway food, confectionery, crisps, soft drinks, ice cream and alcohol. So on a £40 shop the reclaimable VAT is often on three or four lines rather than the whole total. The receipt marks those lines with a symbol and prints a VAT summary at the bottom, which is the part people crop off. Photograph the whole thing.

What HMRC requires, and for how long

The retention periods differ depending on which tax you are looking at, so the safe approach is to work to the longest one that applies to you.

Records	How long
VAT records	At least 6 years, or 10 years if using the VAT One Stop Shop scheme
Self-employed records	At least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline of the relevant tax year
Limited company records	6 years from the end of the last company financial year they relate to, sometimes longer

On format, HMRC is relaxed, and this is the part that surprises people. In its words, there are no rules on how you must keep records. You can keep them on paper, digitally or as part of a software program. The condition attached is that records must be accurate, complete and readable, and HMRC can charge a penalty where they are not.

A photograph or a scan is enough. HMRC's compliance guidance says the duty is met either by retaining the original documents or by preserving the information contained in them, and that originals can be discarded once the storage method captures all the information needed to make a correct and complete return and can reproduce it legibly. For VAT specifically, if the image contains all the detail required, the business does not need to keep the original invoice unless it is needed for something else. There is no need to hoard paper.

A short list of documents does have to stay in original form: construction industry payment and deduction statements, statements of income tax deducted from payments, qualifying distribution statements, anything supporting a claim for relief from foreign tax and, for VAT, the C79 import VAT certificate. That is the whole list. Everything else can be a clear photo.

Six habits that make this painless

Capture at the point of purchase, because reconstructing from a bank statement months later is slow and it is also where the VAT gets lost, since a statement does not show it.
Give suppliers a billing email that goes straight into your bookkeeping system, an address most accounting software provides for exactly this. Set it once per supplier and the invoice files itself.
Photograph paper receipts the day you get them, because till receipts printed on thermal paper fade, sometimes within months, and a blank strip of paper is not a record.
Never crop a screenshot down to just the total, since the VAT number, the supplier address and the date are the parts that make it valid and they are usually the parts sitting outside the crop.
Ask for the VAT receipt at the counter, since a retailer only has to give you one if you ask and the card slip on its own will not do the job.
Chase the missing invoice while it is small, because one email to one supplier this week is easy and forty of them next January is a day of work nobody has.

What good looks like

You are doing this right when:

Every purchase over £250 has a document showing the supplier's VAT number, or a note explaining why there is not one, such as a supplier who is not VAT registered.
Nothing in the bookkeeping is supported only by a bank line or a card machine slip.
Images are readable end to end, with all four edges of the document visible.
The month closes without anyone searching an inbox.
You can produce any single transaction from the last six years within a few minutes.

That last one is the real test, not how tidy the folder looks but how quickly one specific thing comes out of it.

What to do next

Pick your five largest recurring suppliers and find the invoice history page in each account. Turn on automatic invoice emails where the option exists.
Point those emails at your bookkeeping system rather than a personal inbox.
Set a recurring fifteen minutes each month to chase whatever is still missing, while the purchases are recent enough to recognise.

Key takeaways

An order confirmation, a payment confirmation and a VAT invoice are three different documents doing three different jobs.
Only a valid VAT invoice supports a VAT reclaim. A statement, a pro-forma or a delivery note does not.
An order confirmation is still good evidence that a cost belongs to the business, so keep it.
Most online suppliers put the real VAT invoice in the account area rather than in the email.
In a shop the card machine slip is not the VAT receipt, and a retailer only has to give you one if you ask.
Keep VAT records six years, sole trader records five years after the January deadline and company records six years from the end of the financial year.
A clear photo or scan is acceptable for almost everything, so there is no need to keep paper.

The bottom line

Three documents that look identical do three different jobs, and only one of them supports a VAT reclaim. Nothing you have already filed is wasted, because an order confirmation still proves the cost was the business's. The habit that fixes this is small: get the real VAT invoice at the point of purchase, from the supplier's account area online or by asking at the counter in person, rather than reconstructing it from a bank statement months later.

S&J handles bookkeeping and VAT as part of its standard packages, including setting up receipt capture so invoices file themselves. Pricing on the quote generator.

Sources

Every factual claim in this article was checked against primary source on 17 September 2026.

VAT invoices and order confirmations: what to keep and why