Technology

Why Can’t We Have Better Receipts?

A CSV receipt would be simple to implement and would be so helpful

One of my typically not very helpful receipt

Most receipts are as close to useless as I can imagine. No standards exist for how they show you what you bought. Often the descriptions are cryptic and incomplete. There must be a better way.

There is, but nobody I know of offers it.

I would be ecstatic if every store could give me a csv file (comma separated value, can be imported to spreadsheets) of what I bought, the UPC or ISBN or whatever fully identifies it, when I bought it and its price. Possibly shipment and tracking data could be added for some sales. Serial numbers when needed.

We’d have to have some standards body specify what fields should be included, what they should be called, how they should be formatted and so on. There would also have to be some pressure on sellers to provide this data.

This would be optional for you, of course. If the store has your email, they could whip this out to you with almost no extra effort at all as they need every bit of this for their own use. If you don’t care about this, you could have your jumbled old paper receipt.

A seller could, with slightly more effort and expense, provide a web portal where you…