Last updated 2 August 2026
A receipt is not paperwork. It is the thing that establishes when you bought a product, what you paid, and who sold it to you — and almost every route to a free repair, a replacement or a refund starts with those three facts.
Keep a receipt at least as long as your cover lasts — two years for statutory rights, longer if the product has an extended guarantee or you have insured it.
The complication is that “as long as your cover lasts” is not one number. It differs by country, and it differs by layer of cover on the same product. A washing machine bought in Dublin and the same machine bought in Copenhagen do not have the same paperwork shelf life.
Omora is available on the App Store in Denmark, Germany, Austria and Ireland. These are the statutory periods it tracks in those four markets.
The Danish Sale of Goods Act (Købeloven) gives a 24-month statutory complaint period — the reklamationsret — on goods bought from a business. If a defect appears within the first year after delivery, it is presumed to have existed at delivery unless the seller proves otherwise. Practical retention: two years minimum.
German statutory defect rights (Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, BGB) cover goods for two years from delivery, with the burden of proof reversed for the first 12 months (§ 477 BGB). Practical retention: two years minimum.
The Verbrauchergewährleistungsgesetz (VGG, BGBl. I Nr. 175/2021) applies to consumer goods bought from a business on or after 1 January 2022. The seller is liable for defects that existed at handover and appear within two years (§ 10 VGG), and a defect that shows up in the first year is presumed to have been there at handover (§ 11 VGG). One detail is easy to miss: the claim itself lapses three months after the two-year period ends (§ 28 VGG). Practical retention: a little over two years, not exactly two.
Ireland is the outlier. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2022 (No. 37 of 2022) there is no two-year cut-off at all. A fault in the first 12 months is presumed to have been there at delivery unless the seller shows otherwise, the first 30 days can usually be a straight refund of faulty goods, and a claim can be brought for up to six years from delivery (Statute of Limitations 1957, s. 11(1)(a)). Purchases made before 29 November 2022 fall under the Sale of Goods and Supply of Services Act 1980, with the same six-year window. Practical retention: six years.
This is general information about consumer law, not legal advice.
Statutory cover is the floor, not the ceiling, so the statutory number is rarely the number that should set your retention. Check whether the product carries any of these:
The rule that follows is simple: the longest layer sets the retention clock. A four-year extended plan on a two-year statutory product means keeping the receipt for four years, not two. And if you might resell the product, keep the receipt for as long as you own it — many manufacturer guarantees pass to a new owner when you hand over the proof.
Thermal receipts often fade within months. That is the practical failure mode: not a receipt that was thrown away, but a receipt that is still in the drawer and no longer readable eighteen months later, exactly when a fault appears and the statutory clock is still running. A blank strip of thermal paper is worth the same as no receipt.
So the useful instruction is not “keep it for two years”. It is make a clear digital copy while the print is still sharp, and then keep that for as long as the cover lasts.
Whatever you keep needs to establish the same handful of facts: who sold the product, when, what was paid, and which product it was. The receipt does all of that in one document, which is why it is the thing worth capturing. If it is already gone, a bank or card statement, an order-confirmation email, or the retailer's order history can all establish the purchase date — that is the subject of a separate guide on proving a purchase without the receipt.
Keep the serial number and a photo of the product with the receipt, too. A claim usually needs to identify the specific unit, not just the model.
Omora captures a receipt from a scan, a photo or a forwarded confirmation email, and reads the retailer, price, purchase date and warranty from it automatically. It stores a clear digital copy with the product — alongside the serial number, photos and documents — for as long as you own it, so nothing depends on thermal paper surviving. It knows the statutory period for the market the product was bought in, counts those deadlines down, and notifies you before a warranty expires. It is free for up to 10 products, stored on your device from the start: Get Omora on the App Store.