Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real. That makes for folders upon folders of documents and it's actually worse than back in the 20th century because generating and mailing documents has become way easier and cheaper, so things that would have been a one-page typewritten letter back then now are five ten-page ones full of automatically generated crap. One lengthy illness in the family alone filled hundreds of pages and it can be very hard to know what can be thrown away at which point.
Yeah, I'm also in Germany (although not German) and installed Paperless because of this!
I think more than a few of these projects are started and/or maintained by Germans due to the astonishing number of documents received - e.g., paperless-ng appears to have been done by a German, although neither the original Paperless nor Paperless NGX immediately appear to be.
> Definitely, Germany strongly believes that a document that hasn't been a physical piece of paper at least once can't be real.
I'm sorry to tell you that is a an oversimplification and especially for documenting expenses as a company/freelancer it's kind of worse.
Last time I checked if you want to follow the tax law to the word you're not allowed to change the medium:
If an invoice came as a paper copy (e.g. by snail mail), this paper copy is the original. If you scan it the digital version isn't.
If an invoice came as a digital document (e.g. a PDF by email), this digital document is the original - a printed version of that digital document isn't.
So if a tax inspector asks for "originals" it's technically almost impossible to provide them in the sense of the law. If even a tax inspector would care is another question.
It's perfectly legal (and common) for a decade now to scan documents and destroy the paper original as long as you follow some guidelines. Keyword is "ersetzendes Scannen".
And yes, they care about those rules and that you provide "originals" according to that definition - in particular that you didn't modify digital documents in any way. You can (and should) comply with that and there are service providers to help if you are to small to set that up yourself.
Thanks, today I learned about "ersetzendes Scannen". I just checked and it's exactly a decade (2013) since it's allowed which coincidetally is the year when I started working as a freelancer (and I have to care about such rules).
I admit that my last paragraph was kind of hyperbole, but I never heard (at least from other freelancers) of a tax inspector which wasn't happy with either everything printed or everything digital. I guess they really start to care if they suspect something fishy.
Just a side note to this and the other replies: You can also keep the original documents and add scans to paperless for indexing, etc. Since I switched to paperless I keep my originals in binders just ordered by the paperless id, so I can retrieve the original when required.
