Many countries require receipts to be sent to the tax services instantly. In many cases a long enough power cut (days) would render all transactions illegal
(And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
Which countries exactly? I've traveled in UK and France and in both countries when the online cash register was down, they opened their physical ledger, made an entry and gave me a physical handwritten paper receipt written with pen and ink. They said they would make enter the same data online when the online cash register comes back up.
My understanding is that this (NF525) only applies to computerised cash registers (software must be certified NF525 compliant), which there is no obligation to use in the first place.
So it is perfectly legal to use pen and paper and a cash box.
Most governments are not as stupid as the anti-government wingnuts would have you believe. They will not prosecute you for taking transactions non-electronically during a power outage.
In some countries whenever you print a receipt, a copy is also sent to the IRS equivalent of that country. Obviously there are events where that can't happen due to technical reasons outside of the store's control.
Which countries? And, again, I doubt that this is the full picture because there are many cases where people simply don't "print a receipt" perfectly legally...
Germany for example mandates printing a receipt. The receipt must be stored in a certified storage inside the cash register and is signed cryptographically, including the hash of the previous receipt such that there is a hash-chain of printed receipts. Therefore each printed receipt that the customer takes home (and maybe at some point hands in to the tax office for some reason) can be used to check the integrity of the cash register storage and all prior receipts in the chain.
Same in Portugal. Sync with the tax authority can be immediate or deferred (every x days). Obviously, you can still invoice manually using a receipt book, in case of failure or unavailability of software systems.
Thanks! European red tape madness strikes again... At least in France cash registers are not mandatory (for now...) so there is a way around this madness.
This is a bit more than just red tape madness, it's a strategy to make businesses more transparent.
This is about trying to reduce non-reported transactions and too many people dodging their reporting. Even if the rules for cash registries and reporting are detailed,
a) that's not really expensive for businesses - it's easy to automate and there are quite a number of competitors;
b) compared to accounting and tax rules, they are dead simple.
Receipts or invoices are the basis for a firm's whole economic activity, including the underpinning of their financial reporting, their tax burdens etc. And businesses failing to provide receipts erodes not only the tax base, but also any rights a consumer may have.
Its actually less red tape. Getting a second copy of a given invoice is trivial, processing of invoices for tax rebates is also mostly automatic (such as health and education expenses); tax invoicing uses well-defined formats, so its trivial to migrate between systems, and perform all kinds of analysis. Also, it increases transparency - you know that eg. the VAT you're paying is not ending in the vendor's pockets.
(And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)