You have no receipts for last year

The year is over, the return is due, and the receipts are in a truck door, a jacket pocket, a faded pile in the shop, or nowhere at all.

This is recoverable. Not all of it, and not equally across every category — but far more of it than most contractors assume, and the parts that are genuinely lost are lost for reasons worth understanding before next year.

Start from the money, not from the paper

You are not reconstructing receipts. You are reconstructing transactions, and the record of those already exists.

1. Download every bank and card statement for the year, as CSV where you can get it.
2. Include every account the business touched — including the personal card you used at the supply house that one weekend.
3. Get supplier statements. This is the step people skip and it is the highest-yield one. Your main suppliers can usually produce a full year of invoices in a single export, often in a day. For most contractors that recovers the largest single block of missing documentation in one email.
4. Check the software you already use. Field service and dispatch systems, fuel cards, and the parts distributor's online portal all hold purchase history nobody thinks to look at.

Between those four you can typically rebuild the great majority of a year without a single paper receipt.

What a bank statement does and does not prove

This is the distinction that matters, and it is where the risk sits.

A bank or card statement proves that you spent money, when, and to whom. What it does not prove is what you bought and why it was for the business. For most ordinary business expenses that is usually enough to support the deduction, especially where the vendor makes the purpose obvious — a plumbing supply house, a tool distributor, a trade licence renewal.

Where it is not enough is the categories the rules treat as needing more:

Vehicle expenses. Mileage deductions require records of the mileage, the dates, and the business purpose — a bank statement showing fuel purchases does not establish business mileage at all. Reconstructing this after the fact from job records and calendars is possible but laborious, and it is the most commonly disallowed category in a contractor examination.

Meals. These need the business purpose and, where others were present, who they were with. A charge at a diner proves lunch happened, not that it was deductible.

Travel and lodging. Purpose, dates and business connection.

Anything with a personal-use element. A truck, a phone, a computer, a laptop bought at a general retailer. Mixed-use assets attract questions and the burden of showing the business share sits with you.

Large asset purchases. Not because the deduction is doubtful, but because the invoice establishes what it was, when it was placed in service, and what it cost — all of which drive depreciation treatment for years afterwards.

Working through it

Sort by vendor, not by date. Every charge at the same supply house is almost certainly the same category. Sorting by vendor turns eight hundred transactions into forty decisions.

Deal with the biggest amounts first. The tail of small charges matters far less than getting the twenty largest right, and if time runs out you want it to run out on the small ones.

Write down the purpose while you can still recall it. A contemporaneous note is better than nothing, and a note made now is better than one made in two years under examination. Note honestly what you actually remember.

Flag what you genuinely cannot support, and tell your CPA rather than burying it. There are established ways to handle estimates and reconstructions, and a CPA who knows which items are soft can position the return properly. One who finds out during an examination cannot.

Do not invent documentation. Creating a receipt after the fact for something you cannot substantiate crosses a line from a weak record into something much more serious, and it is not worth it for any amount of tax.

The categories to fix first for next year

Whatever you recover this time, three habits remove nearly all of this permanently:

One card, business only. The single highest-leverage change available. A dedicated business card makes the statement itself a near-complete expense record, and it ends the reconstruction problem for good. Separating business and personal finances is worth doing for several other reasons too.

Snap it at the counter. Every accounting package now attaches a photo to a transaction from a phone. Ten seconds at the supply house, and the receipt is attached to the right transaction forever — which is also the only version of receipt storage that survives a truck fire.

Mileage tracked automatically. This is the category most likely to be disallowed and the hardest to reconstruct, and an app that logs drives in the background solves it entirely. Mileage against actual expenses is worth reading before you choose which method to track for.

None of those is a system anyone has to learn. They are three decisions made once.

Related

• Separating business and personal finances
• Mileage or actual expenses: which is better for a work truck
• Your CPA says the books are not ready to file
• Tax deductions contractors miss

This is general information about record-keeping, not tax advice. Substantiation requirements differ by expense type and the rules change. Confirm the treatment of anything you cannot fully document with a CPA or enrolled agent before filing.