ED13 - Task: Scan and process business meal receipts

Trigger: Business entertainment took place; the hospitality establishment has issued an invoice (restaurant). The expenses are to be claimed as operating expenses — this requires statutory evidence (§ 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 the amount and business purpose are substantiated. For evidence, the following must be specified in writing: place, date, participants, occasion for the business entertainment, and the amount of the expenses. If the business entertainment took place in a restaurant, details of the occasion and participants are sufficient; the invoice must be attached. In addition, business entertainment expenses must be recorded individually and separately (§ 4 Abs. 7 EStG).
• BMF letter dated 19.11.2025 (IV C 6 - S 2145/00026/005/033, replaces 30.6.2021): The self-issued receipt may be created digitally; authorization is provided by electronic signature or electronic approval (no qualified signature required). Required are timely creation, the creation and signature timestamps in the document, an unambiguous link between the receipt and the self-issued receipt (e.g., reference/index), and GoBD compliance including process documentation (BMF 28.11.2019).

The task in five steps

1. Scanning — The paper/restaurant receipt is photographed/scanned and stored as the original document (e.g., PDF) in the receipt directory.
2. OCR capture — The machine-readable text (ocr.txt) is extracted from the receipt, and its quality/trust (TrustVector-BitVector, starting at 0x0001 = machine-unverified) is documented.
3. Detect receipt type — The receipt type is determined from the OCR text using rules: here BUSINESS_MEAL_RECEIPT (business meal receipt; identified by “business entertainment expenses”, “persons hosted”, “occasion for the business entertainment”).
4. Include in the signing process — A *.gcsig.md (signature artifact, class GCSIG) is generated that carries the digital self-issued receipt: the legally required details in an embedded content block (schema business-meal-receipt-1.0), the OCR provenance (ocr), the integrated sidecar block (source), and the signature block (signature) with a facsimile of the signatory.
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 original document.

The artifact: receipt and signature in one document

For receipts included in the signing process, no separate .v7g.md is needed: the *.gcsig.md fully performs the sidecar function (rule “Sidecar function/transition”: the .gcsig.md is created from the .v7g.md, no loss of information, no competing sidecars). Starting with schema gcsig-1.4, it contains:

Revision safety — Git-native compliance

• The anchor is immutable: the SHA-256 of the original document. It never changes; any change to the content creates a new version of the original document.
• The *.gcsig.md (like the GCPN) is a mutable container whose state changes (phases) are recorded in an audit ledger through GPG-signed Git commits. Git history alone is not sufficient here (force-push is possible) — hence, a signature is applied over the commit/the GCSIG.
• Changes to the self-issued receipt content are therefore traceable; each signed version is retained in the history.

Example (series: fictional organization KMU)

The managing director of KMU hosts a representative of a specialist publishing house after a trade fair to discuss a possible publication. The restaurant receipt for €59.80 is scanned; OCR identifies the receipt type as BUSINESS_MEAL_RECEIPT. The self-issued receipt is generated as *.gcsig.md (participants, occasion “trade fair — possible publication”, amount, sphere ideell, no input tax deduction, posted as expense reimbursement) and presented to the managing director for signing.

Tools

References

• Legal bases: § 4 Abs. 5 Satz 1 Nr. 2 und 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 .v7g.md → .gcsig.md.
• Receipt filing structure: ED06.