I'm curious about people's experiences aiming to be paperless in Japan. My specific concern is 領収書 (ryoshusho) for blue form purposes. Are people scanning them to submit to their accountant, and yet still keeping the paper document for a certain period of time? Also, any thoughts on linking a business credit card to online tax accounting software such as freee or MoneyForward? Would this then negate the need to ask for ryoshusho every time? Any other tips?
I did a bit of research and found these two articles:
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/ ... documents/
https://www.taxathand.com/article/12201 ... servation#
It seems like there are movements towards paperless tax documents, but apparently Japan lags behind the US and South Korea. English language articles about the current state of affairs seems to be lacking.
According to the second article, taxpayers needs to submit an application for e-documents and use "commercially available software that has been certified by the Japan Image and Information Management Association (JIIMA)" I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 and scan everything with Japanese OCR into PDF, I would assume that should be sufficient?
Thanks!
Paperless Japan
Re: Paperless Japan
I had a similar question.
Receipts for my internet and electricity are now via PDF. I was wondering about whether I needed to print them out or not. I noticed that they put a date stamp on the PDF on the day that I download it. I guess I would only need to print them for an audit.
For scanning paper receipts, if I understand the situation correctly, the scanner needs to add a printed date stamp to the scanned PDF at the point it is scanned for it to be acceptable. But am I understanding it correctly? My scanner doesn't do that as far as I know. But I'm not the best with technology.
Do please let us know if you find out anything more.
Receipts for my internet and electricity are now via PDF. I was wondering about whether I needed to print them out or not. I noticed that they put a date stamp on the PDF on the day that I download it. I guess I would only need to print them for an audit.
For scanning paper receipts, if I understand the situation correctly, the scanner needs to add a printed date stamp to the scanned PDF at the point it is scanned for it to be acceptable. But am I understanding it correctly? My scanner doesn't do that as far as I know. But I'm not the best with technology.
Do please let us know if you find out anything more.