The days of the paper receipt are numbered

The Brussels Times recently posted an article “The days of the paper receipt in Belgium are numbered” on their website. The article discusses Wallonia’s initiative to reduce the environmental impact of shopping receipts. Wallonia banned the mandatory use of paper receipts, allowing customers to request them only if needed. This move aims to prevent the annual destruction of four million trees for producing receipts in Belgium, aligning with the region’s commitment to environmental sustainability.

The current problem with digital receipts

Today, some of the restaurants or coffee shops don’t hand over any ticket at all. If you require one for your bookkeeping, for splitting the bill, or simply for your finances – you need to explicitly request one. This is good, as there aren’t any tickets printed for the majority of customers who don’t need or want one.

But, if you do request one, some ask you to enter your email address, and the receipt gets mailed to you. Fair enough, but this simply does not work. Entering your email address takes way too long. This is because if they need to email it to you, you need to register yourself as a customer in their system. Besides that, entering your email address on the tablet takes more time in general than simply getting a paper ticket handed to you.

If there’s a line waiting, this comes with an additional amount of stress. And then the best part sometimes is… the ticket will NEVER arrive in your inbox. Did they forget to click send? Are their email servers, not set up correctly and the system actually cannot send? This is a big problem if you need the receipt to match your bookkeeping on a business trip for example.

Early Stages

With VISIT we want to erase the use of paper receipts, yet keep your receipts as easily accessible as possible. Currently, we don’t have the power to remove any paper tickets. The Visit application allows you to take a picture of your receipt and earn VISIT tokens in return. Your receipt is stored; if someone else scans your ticket afterward, they will receive a duplicate. This makes it so that everyone who needs the receipt can have it – and we validate if the ticket is already in the system. The duplicate validation is mainly to prevent double rewards from being awarded to multiple users.

The Goal

We invest in a better future. What’s a better future? One without the wait. One without the stress of a line with people looking at you while you enter your email address, one without paper tickets for the trees and the water. One where you receive the ticket you asked for!

Our system will make it super easy for you to receive and manage all your receipts. For the moment focussing only on restaurants and bars, but the ideal dream would be a paperless world for any store and easy access to any of your tickets – without you needing to do anything in particular for it.

Fast, easy, future-proof.