Do you regularly receive payments without issuing an invoice? Think of hairdressers, shopkeepers, beauticians or psychologists: customers pay at the counter and leave with a till receipt at most. In that case, you need to keep a daily receipts book, and possibly a cash book too. Two documents that are often confused, but each serves its own purpose.
On this page, we explain the difference, who needs to keep what, and how to fill them in correctly.
The distinction lies in what you record:
The same sale can therefore appear in both books: a customer who pays cash without an invoice shows up as a receipt in your daily receipts book and as incoming cash in your cash book.
The daily sales book or the daily receipts book is mandatory for every VAT-liable business that makes sales without issuing an invoice, typically sales to private customers (B2C). Self-employed people who benefit from the VAT exemption scheme for small businesses must also keep one.
You do not need a daily receipts book if:
Hospitality businesses are in principle also subject to this obligation. If you work with a registered cash register system, you are exempt: the white cash register generates the daily receipts book automatically. The registered cash register system is mandatory as soon as your annual turnover from meals reaches 25,000 euros excluding VAT.
Smaller establishments that stay below this threshold and do not use one must issue VAT receipts and keep a daily receipts book on top of that.
The rules are simpler than you might think:
Fill it in daily, at the latest at the end of each working day. You record the total amount of your receipts per day, not each sale separately.
A paper daily receipts book is filled in with indelible ink, without blank lines and without crossings-out that make the original entry unreadable. Like the rest of your accounts, you keep the book for ten years.
You may also keep it digitally, provided the entries cannot be altered: you correct a mistake with a corrective entry, not by changing or deleting the old one. Accountable has a digital daily receipts book that complies with all legal requirements.
You can buy a daily receipts book in most stationery shops, but you may also keep track of your receipts digitally, for example in Accountable.
Imagine you sell garden tools and take in 1,196.50 euros in one day, including a robotic lawnmower at 749 euros:
| Date | Description | Amount received incl. VAT | VAT rate |
| 21/08/2026 | Daily takings (various sales) | €447.50 | 21% |
| 21/08/2026 | Robotic lawnmower | €749.00 | 21% |
If you regularly work with cash, you must keep a cash book. If you only very occasionally receive a cash payment, a full cash book is generally not necessary, although every cash movement must still be accounted for somewhere in your books.
Keeping a cash book is mandatory for self-employed people who regularly work with cash. Anyone who only sporadically receives a cash payment or occasionally makes a purchase in cash does not need to keep one.
The cash book works like a logbook for your till. For each movement, you record the date, a description, the amount and the new cash balance. Small receipts from the same day may be added together.
The balance in your cash book must match what is actually in your till at all times. A negative cash balance is physically impossible and is therefore a red flag during an inspection.
If you are a sole trader and therefore keep simplified accounts, there is no need to process your cash book through accounting software. You only need to keep the cash book up to date and be able to present it.
With double-entry bookkeeping (legal entities), you need to link your cash book to purchases or sales. This means creating connections in your accounting software between the different types of journals, such as those for purchases, sales, finances and inventory.
Income you record in a daily receipts book does, however, need to be passed on to your accountant or processed in your accounts yourself, for example via Accountable.
Author - Artyom Ghazaryan
Artyom is Head of Accounting at Accountable, and a chartered Accountant & Tax Specialist.
Who is Artyom ?Thank you for your feedback!
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