Austria eases digital till receipts and finds 130 register cases

Austria eases digital till receipts and finds 130 register cases

10 November 2026: Austrian businesses have been allowed since 1 October 2026 to hand over a till receipt by email or app, or to display it on a device, and the finance ministry began a campaign on 3 November to promote it. The ministry's first inspections since the change found the digital receipt little used and 130 cases of cash register breaches.

Not yet independently verified. This rests on the finance ministry's press release of 3 November and its information page. We did not open the legal text that made the change, so the exact amended provision is not given here, and the inspection figures are the ministry's own. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

What changed at the till, and what did not

The easing concerns delivery of the receipt and nothing else. As before, the receipt must be created and signed by the cash register in direct connection with the payment and made available to the buyer. A retailer can now do that electronically, and a customer who wants paper is still entitled to it.

The ministry says the digital receipt replaces neither the duty to run a cash register nor the requirements for recording and technically securing each transaction. Austria introduced general register and receipt duties in January 2016, and since 2017 receipts have had to carry a visible anti-tampering feature, such as a QR code or barcode. A receipt without that code does not count as a proper one, in the ministry's account, and the rule applies to a digital receipt as it does to paper.

For a software buyer, the practical consequence sits in the point-of-sale system. A bakery or restaurant that wants to stop printing needs a till that can sign the receipt at the moment of payment and pass it to a customer's email address, an app or a screen. Before paying for an upgrade, ask the supplier which of those three routes it supports and how the machine-readable security code reaches the customer in each.

Inspections found old problems more than new ones

The Finance Police, part of the Office for Combating Fraud, ran a nationwide check from mid to late October at 675 locations, covering 707 businesses and 1,600 people. It reported no notable breaches involving digital receipts, and said they are not yet widely used.

The older rules fared worse. Inspectors documented 130 cases, with 260 individual offences, of direct breaches of the register duty:

• 53 where the register was not used for sales
• 16 with no register at all
• 61 where the register lacked the required security

They also recorded 113 receipt offences: 85 receipts not issued, 7 issued only on request and 21 that did not meet the legal requirements.

A campaign aimed at customers

The first wave of the campaign, under the slogan "Rechnung mitnehmen rechnet sich", lasts about a month and costs 290,000 euros. It is directed at customers, on the ministry's reasoning that a receipt taken away helps ensure the tax reaches the budget. State Secretary Barbara Eibinger-Miedl called the digital receipt a long-demanded relief for companies, and the ministry estimates that about 1,500 kilometres of receipts are printed in Austria every day.

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Sources

• Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance, press release on the digital receipt campaign, 3 November 2026
• Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance, information page on the digital receipt, 10 November 2026