Another huge change coming to shops in Hungary: say goodbye to paper receipts

Retailers using cash registers are legally obliged to provide a printed receipt after the purchase. However, if everything goes according to plan, this will change next year. The National Tax and Customs Administration is working hard to find an alternative that will retain the practical benefits of the receipt, but will also be digital.

Paper receipts to be replace by digital ones

Today, traders using cash registers are legally obliged to provide a printed receipt after the purchase in Hungary. G7 understands that the National Tax and Customs Administration (Nemzeti Adó- és Vámhivatal, NAV) is currently working hard on an alternative to this. It would retain the practical advantages of the receipt, but would also be digital.

One of the reasons for the move is that the new digital receipt system would reduce the amount of waste generated, as a significant proportion of receipts end up in the bin. Meanwhile, online receipting also seems to offer a number of new digital opportunities.

How will I use the e-Receipt?

According to Attila Mizsányi, Head of the Risk Analysis and Data Science Department of the NAV, one of the project’s colleagues, the e-Receipt will be launched in July 2024, i.e. in just over a year. The full transition will take four years. The IT background for the paperless receipt has been developed so that all we, customers, need to use it is a smartphone and a downloaded app, napi.hu explains.

The current plans are as follows:

1. You, the everyday shopper, download the app to their phone;
2. At the checkout, you show the QR code available in the app;
3. The cash register scans the QR code and generates the electronic receipt;
4. The cash register uploads the receipt to the Receipt Database at the NAV;
5. You, the customer, will then be able to download the receipt from this Receipt Database. You will not get a printed paper receipt.

In other words, what will happen is not that the paper receipt will be digitised, but that the receipt will be born digital and will be authentic. However, if someone still insists on a paper receipt, the machine will still be able to print it for them.

In practice, this means that all cash registers will have to be replaced or made capable of issuing e-Receipts.