Can I claim a business expense without a receipt?

Often yes. The regulations allow substantiation by other sufficient evidence, meaning your own detailed written statement plus corroborating evidence such as the card statement line. An affidavit is the statement half of that. For ordinary business costs this is generally workable. For travel, meals, gifts and vehicle expenses a stricter rule applies.

What is the $75 receipt rule?

Documentary evidence such as a receipt is required for any lodging expense at any amount, and for any other travel, meal, gift or vehicle expense of $75 or more. Below $75 a contemporaneous record is generally the accepted path. The threshold raises the bar on what your record must contain; it does not mean the deduction is lost.

What has to be in a missing receipt affidavit?

Five elements: the amount, the time, the place, the business purpose, and for meals and gifts the business relationship of the people present. Most templates capture only the amount and date, and the missing elements are what cause deductions to be disallowed.

Restub

Missing Receipt Affidavit

Q: Does it matter when I write the affidavit?

Yes. A record made at or near the time of the expense, while you still have full present knowledge of it, carries a high degree of credibility that a statement prepared later does not. A later statement needs stronger corroborating evidence to reach the same level.

You lost the receipt. The deduction is still real. Write the record now, while you still remember what it was for, because that is the part the IRS actually weighs.

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Who and what Your name Business or entity the expense belongs to

The expense

Date of expense Amount (USD)

Vendor or merchant Place City and street if you have it. "Place" is one of the five elements the rules ask for. How it was paid The card line on your statement is your corroborating evidence. Name it here.

Why it was a business expense Business purpose Be specific. "Supplies" is not a business purpose. This sentence is the whole point of the document. Business relationship or people present Required for meals and gifts: who was there and their business relationship to you.

The receipt, and what backs it up Why the receipt is unavailable Corroborating evidence you have Your statement plus corroboration is the substantiation path the regulations actually provide when the receipt is gone. Tick everything true. Each one makes this document harder to dismiss.

Card or bank statement line Calendar entry that day Email or text about it Photo from the time Someone who was there Order or confirmation number Job or delivery record

Steps taken to get a duplicate Showing you tried carries real weight, especially on larger amounts. How to actually get one.

Fixes today as the moment you wrote this. A record made while you still remember the expense carries weight a statement written next April does not, and this is how you prove which one yours was. Only a one-way fingerprint is sent. The text never leaves this device.

Timestamp first and the seal prints on the document. Print now and it comes out marked as an unsigned draft.

Before you file this

Let us try to get the original

A real receipt beats any affidavit. We will email the merchant on your behalf, from our address, never yours, and tell you either way. If they send it, you get the document. If they refuse, their reply goes onto a dated record that proves you tried, which is the "steps taken" line above filling itself in. Free while we are in beta.

Where should we send the result Merchant email or website, if you know it Leave it blank and we will go looking. If we cannot find a way to reach them we will say so, send nothing, and charge nothing.

Missing Receipt Affidavit

Unsigned draft

Claimant—

Entity—

Amount—

Date of expense—

Vendor—

Place—

Paid by—

Business purpose—

Relationship—

Receipt statusMerchant did not provide a receipt

Corroboration—

Efforts made—

I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct.

Signature

Date signed

Thin

What this document actually is

An affidavit is not a substitute receipt, and anyone selling it that way is lying to you. It is one half of a real mechanism: the regulations allow substantiation by other sufficient evidence, meaning your own detailed statement plus corroborating evidence, for exactly the situation where the records are gone. This form builds the statement half and asks you to name the corroboration, because a statement on its own is the weak half of that test.

For ordinary business costs, materials, software, supplies, subcontractors, a specific contemporaneous note paired with the matching statement line is generally workable. For travel, meals, gifts, and vehicle expenses a separate and stricter rule applies: documentary evidence is required for any lodging at all, and for any other expense of $75 or more, and that rule says plainly that deductions are not allowed on approximations or unsupported testimony.

That threshold raises the bar. It does not close the door. If the receipt genuinely no longer exists, the statement-plus-corroboration path is still the path, and above $75 it simply has to be built better: more corroboration, a purpose line specific enough to survive a question, and a record of what you did to get a duplicate. That is what the strength meter above is doing. It gets harder to reach Strong on a $600 hotel than on a $12 coffee, which is correct, because the two records are not asked to carry the same weight.

If the merchant can still reprint it, get the reprint. It beats any affidavit and it takes four minutes. But losing a receipt is not the same as losing the deduction, and nobody should walk away from a legitimate business expense because a slip of thermal paper went through the wash.

Getting a duplicate, in order of what actually works

Your card issuer first. Many issuers surface the merchant's full name, location, and reference number on the transaction detail, and some carry an itemized receipt from the merchant. That detail alone strengthens this affidavit even when it is not a receipt.
Search your email for the amount. Not the merchant name, the amount. Emailed receipts often arrive from a payment processor under a name you would never think to search.
Chains and franchises can usually reprint from the card's last four plus the date, typically within thirty to ninety days. Ask for the transaction lookup, not the manager.
Hotels and airlines keep folios and itineraries for years. A hotel folio is the single easiest large receipt to recover, and it is also the one the rules require at any amount, so it is always worth the call.
Online orders live in the account you bought from, under order history, long after the confirmation email is gone.
If none of that works, write down that you tried, and when. Put it in the steps field above. Documented effort is itself evidence.

Why the timing matters more than the form

The regulations say a record made at or near the time of the expense, meaning while you still have full present knowledge of it, carries a high degree of credibility that a statement written later does not. A statement prepared afterward is not worthless, but it then needs corroborating evidence strong enough to drag it back up to that level. Which is the practical case for writing this today rather than in April: the same words are worth more now.

The five things it has to establish

Amount. Time. Place. Business purpose. And for meals and gifts, the business relationship of the people involved. Most affidavit templates on the internet capture the first two and skip the rest. This one asks for all five, and the strength meter tells you which of them you are still missing rather than letting you print something incomplete and find out later.

A note on honesty

No tool can know whether your lunch was a business lunch. The business purpose line is yours to write and yours to stand behind, and the declaration above it is the real thing, an unsworn declaration under penalty of perjury. Restub will help you remember an expense accurately and prove when you recorded it. It will not invent one, and it will never write your business purpose for you.

Not tax advice

This is a document generator, not a tax advisor, and none of the above is tax advice for your situation. If real money rides on it, have your CPA look at it. If you do not have one, that is worth fixing before the affidavit is.

Where this came from

Restub rebuilds receipts from card charges and reads photographed ones, so your books stay current without manual entry. This tool is the part we could give away whole. See what Restub does.