You know the one. A shoebox, a desk drawer, or a folder in your email called "documents — sort later" that has been sitting there for months. You are not alone: sooner or later almost every sole trader hits a stretch where record-keeping simply could not keep pace with the work. The good news is that it can be caught up. You do not need a week of evenings with a calculator — one systematic evening and a little patience will do. This article sets out the exact order to work in to turn a pile of paper and email into a proper record, and what to do when a document is gone for good.
Who this really applies to — and how strictly
Before you start sorting, it helps to know how hard the rules actually bite. If you keep tax records (daňová evidence) and claim real expenses, you need the documents behind those expenses: they are what reduces your tax base, and without them the expense is hard to defend if the tax office looks. If you claim flat-rate expenses instead — a percentage of income — you do not need expense documents for income tax at all, because the percentage replaces them. You still have to keep proper records of income, because income always has to be evidenced. And if you are registered for DPH (Czech VAT), or an identified person, you need VAT tax documents regardless of how you claim income tax expenses; that is the one exception the flat rate does not cover. So work out which group you are in before you start — it can save you hours spent on paperwork you do not actually need. What to keep and what to skip under the flat rate is covered in Flat-rate expenses: which documents to record and keep.
The best checklist is already at home — in your bank statement
The usual thing that stalls people is the question "where do I even start when I do not know what is missing". The answer is simpler than it looks: download your bank and card statements for the period you want to catch up on. Every payment on the statement is a potential document — and suddenly you have a concrete list of payments that either have a document or need one tracked down. Instead of getting lost in an endless pile of paper, you work through a finite list of lines, ticking each one as "have it" or "missing". That single step turns an open-ended task into a defined list with an end.
The rescue, in five steps
The whole thing splits into five steps. You do not have to do them all in one sitting — spread them over several evenings if you like. What matters is the order:
- Download your account and card statements and turn them into a simple list of payments for the period. That list is your plan.
- Collect the electronic documents — go through your email (search for "invoice", "billing", "payment confirmation") and download invoices from the customer portals of suppliers who archive them for you: phone operator, software vendor, energy supplier, hosting. This part usually goes faster than you expect.
- For the larger amounts still missing from your list, ask the supplier for a duplicate. For a bigger purchase that is normally worth the email; for small spending it is not.
- Photograph the paper receipts with your phone — no scanner needed. In small batches if you prefer, ten a night in front of the television, rather than trying to beat the whole box in one go.
- Upload it all to Taxorio in one batch and let the app sort the documents and read the details off them.
How Taxorio handles a large batch at once
The last step — getting everything into Taxorio — is where most of the time is saved. Under Settings → Import data you can upload up to 500 files in a single batch, in any mix of formats: PDF invoices, photos of receipts (JPG, PNG, HEIC), ZIP archives, emails (.eml) and CSV, XML or XLSX spreadsheets. Each file can be up to 10 MB, and a ZIP or email container up to 50 MB. You do not have to sort the files by type beforehand or add them one by one. Photos and scans that need AI reading are processed up to 150 per batch, so a very large box is best split into two or three runs.
For scanned receipts and photos the AI handles the content — it reads the supplier, the amount, the VAT and the date, including on a till receipt where the date shares a line with the time of purchase. It adds the expense category, the default business-use percentage from your settings, and a short description of what was bought. Nothing is written into your records until you have seen the preview, and anything Taxorio could not read with confidence is left for you to fill in by hand. The original document is then stored as an attachment to the expense, so you still have it if anyone asks.
What to do when a document is gone for good
Sometimes a paper receipt really is lost beyond recovery — faded, thrown out, or never issued in the first place. In some situations the expense can still be evidenced another way, but without the document your position is much weaker if it is ever checked. With suppliers who keep a record of your purchases (e-shops, phone operators, energy suppliers) it is usually enough to ask for a duplicate or download the invoice from the customer portal. We covered missing documents in detail in Lost receipt or invoice: how to evidence a tax expense — worth a read if this has happened to you with more than one document.
How to avoid it next time
Once the box is dealt with, it pays to set up a routine so it does not build up again. The simplest is to scan documents as they appear — scanning on a phone keeps it manageable, and we go into it in Scanning receipts with a mobile phone. If you work with an accountant, or do your own records month by month, a regular rhythm along the lines of the checklist in How to hand documents to your accountant: a monthly checklist helps too. And if you are not sure what can actually be claimed as a tax expense, there is an overview in Deductible expenses: what you can claim.
Documents you rescue this way then need keeping even after they are recorded — how long and why is in Archiving documents for the tax office.
In short
A box full of receipts looks like a lost weekend, but it fits into one evening if you keep to a fixed order: statements first, as the list of what you are looking for, then the electronic documents, then photos of the paper ones — and one bulk upload to Taxorio at the end. You do not have to find every last document and you do not have to finish on the first attempt. Once everything is uploaded and the preview checked, your records are back in order — and the box will not build up again if you set aside a few minutes a week for scanning as you go.
Taxorio scope: Taxorio provides invoicing and income/expense records for Czech sole traders. It is not full accounting or personalised tax advice. For an unsupported or unusual case, verify the treatment with a Czech accountant or tax adviser before filing.