ED13 - Task: Scanning and Processing Entertainment Receipts

Trigger: A business entertainment event has taken place; the hospitality establishment has issued an invoice (restaurant). The expenses are to be claimed as a business expense — for this, the statutory evidence must be provided (§ 4 Abs. 5 Satz 1 Nr. 2 EStG).

What the law requires

• § 4 Abs. 5 Satz 1 Nr. 2 EStG: 70 % of the expenses are deductible insofar as they are reasonable and both the amount and the business purpose are evidenced. For evidence, the following must be stated in writing: place, date, participants, occasion of the entertainment as well as the amount of the expenses. If the entertainment took place in a restaurant, details of occasion and participants suffice; the invoice must be attached. In addition, entertainment expenses must be recorded individually and separately (§ 4 Abs. 7 EStG).
• BMF letter of 19.11.2025 (IV C 6 - S 2145/00026/005/033, replaces 30.6.2021): The self-generated receipt may be created digitally; authorization is effected by electronic signature or electronic approval (no qualified signature required). Required are prompt creation, creation and signature time in the document, a one-to-one link between receipt and self-generated receipt (e.g. reference/index), and GoBD compliance incl. procedural documentation (BMF 28.11.2019).

The task in five steps

1. Scanning — The paper/restaurant receipt is photographed/scanned and stored as an Ur-Doc (e.g. PDF) in the receipt directory.
2. OCR capture — the interpretable text (ocr.txt) is extracted from the receipt and documented with its quality/trust (TrustVector bit vector, start 0x0001 = machine-unverified).
3. Recognize receipt type — the receipt type is determined from the OCR text on a rule-based basis: here BUSINESS_MEAL_RECEIPT (entertainment receipt; recognized by “Bewirtungsaufwendungen”, “Bewirtete Personen”, “Anlass der Bewirtung”).
4. Transfer to the signature process — a *.gcsig.md (signature artifact, class GCSIG) is generated, which carries the digital self-generated receipt: the legally required details as embedded content (schema business-meal-receipt-1.0), the OCR provenance (ocr), the integrated sidecar block (source), and the signature block (signature) with facsimile of the signing person.
5. Present and sign — the artifact is set to presented, presented to the human (HITL) for signing, and after approval set to accepted → signed. The anchor for the signature is the SHA-256 of the Ur-Doc.

The artifact: receipt and signature in one document

For receipts that are transferred to the signature process, no separate .gc.md is needed: the *.gcsig.md fully carries the sidecar function (rule “Sidecar function/transition”: the .gc.md becomes the .gcsig.md, no loss of information, no competing sidecars). From schema gcsig-1.4 onward, it contains:

Audit-proofness — Git-native compliance

• The anchor is immutable: the SHA-256 of the Ur-Doc. It never changes; every substantive change creates a new Ur-Doc version.
• The *.gcsig.md (like the GCPN) is a mutable container whose state changes (phases) become an audit ledger through GPG-signed Git commits. The plain Git history alone is not sufficient (force-push possible) — hence the signature over the commit/the GCSIG.
• Changes to the self-generated receipt content are thus traceable; the respectively signed version remains preserved in the history.

Example (series: fictional organization KMU)

The managing director of KMU hosts a representative of a specialist publisher after a trade fair to discuss a possible publication. The restaurant receipt for 59.80 € is scanned; OCR identifies the receipt type BUSINESS_MEAL_RECEIPT. The self-generated receipt is created as *.gcsig.md (participants, occasion “trade fair — possible publication”, amount, sphere ideell, without input tax deduction, recording as reimbursement of expenses) and presented to the managing director for signing.

Tools

Reference

• Legal bases: § 4 Abs. 5 Satz 1 Nr. 2 and Abs. 7 EStG; R 4.10 EStR; BMF 19.11.2025; GoBD (BMF 28.11.2019).
• Signature/sidecar: see GCBoK, Part VI (Digital Signage) — GCSIG and the transition .gc.md → .gcsig.md.
• Receipt organization: ED06.