No Receipt or No GST Number? What to Do With the Transaction

You're working through a stack of receipts — or, more likely these days, a bank feed — and you hit the awkward ones. A coffee-shop slip with no GST number. A $300 charge from a vendor whose receipt you never got. A line on the bank statement that just says a name and an amount. What do you do?

The mistake almost everyone makes is treating this as one question. It's actually three: do you enter it, do you deduct it, and do you claim the GST? Keep them separate and the answers get clear.

Read on for the decision tree, what to do in each case, and a real-world example.

Two questions people merge into one

This is the whole article in one idea, so it's worth saying plainly. When you spend money in your business, two separate things might happen:

• You deduct the expense against your business income — that's income tax (ITA). It depends on the expense being real, reasonable, and for the business, and on you keeping adequate records.
• You recover the GST/HST you paid as an input tax credit — that's the GST/HST system (Excise Tax Act). It depends on having specific documentation, including, above certain amounts, the supplier's registration number.

They are governed by different rules and they fail independently. You can be fully entitled to the deduction and not entitled to the ITC on the very same receipt. Once you see that, the rest is just sorting out which one you're missing.

When the GST number is actually required

The CRA's Input Tax Credit Information (GST/HST) Regulations set out what your supporting document must show, and the requirements scale with the size of the purchase:

So the line that bites is $100: at or above it, the supplier's registration number is non-negotiable for an ITC. (These thresholds replaced the old $30/$150 ones on April 20, 2021. For the field-by-field detail, see No Valid Invoice, No ITC.)

Source: Input Tax Credit Information (GST/HST) Regulations (SOR/91-45); CRA GST/HST Memorandum 8-4, "Documentary Requirements for Claiming Input Tax Credits." The supplier's registration number is required for claims of $100 or more.

The whole thing on one page

A receipt with no GST number

When the receipt has no registration number, the first thing to figure out is why:

The vendor isn't registered. Plenty of small suppliers — anyone under the $30,000 small-supplier threshold, many casual and online sellers — legitimately don't charge GST and have no number. There was no tax on the purchase, so there's no ITC to claim. You simply deduct the full amount and move on. Nothing is wrong.

Tax was charged, but the document is deficient. The receipt shows a GST line, or you only have a credit-card slip, but there's no registration number. Now you've paid GST you can't substantiate. At $100 or more you must go back and get a compliant invoice. If you can't, don't claim the ITC — but you don't lose everything: the unrecovered GST simply becomes part of the expense (or the cost of the asset) and is deducted that way instead. You recover it slowly through the write-off rather than dollar-for-dollar through the credit.

A bank-feed line with no receipt: do you enter it?

This is the everyday one, and the answer is unambiguous: yes, you always enter it. The bank is the source of truth — real money left the account, so it gets recorded. Skip transactions because a receipt is missing and your books stop reconciling to the bank, and then nothing downstream can be trusted. The bank statement is itself a record that a payment was made.

What's a decision is how you enter it:

Default to no GST. With no receipt, you have none of the documentation an ITC requires. Code the line tax-out and record the full amount as the expense. The dangerous, extremely common error here is letting your accounting software auto-extract GST on every expense — assuming 5% or 13% is baked in — when you don't have a compliant receipt. That quietly inflates your ITCs with unsupported amounts, which is exactly what the CRA disallows on review. A bank feed makes this a one-click mistake. Resist it.

Then flag and chase. Mark anything material or ambiguous as "missing receipt" so it can be followed up. A bank line proves you paid someone; it doesn't prove what you bought or that it was for the business — and the CRA can ask. When the receipt turns up, that's when you split out the ITC and confirm the category.

Source: CRA, "Keeping records," and Income Tax Act s.230 — you must keep adequate books and records to support what you report. A bank or card statement supports that a payment was made; it is not, on its own, sufficient documentation to claim an ITC.

Is it even a business expense? Code it, don't delete it

Sometimes the real issue isn't the GST — it's that you can't tell whether the charge belongs to the business at all. Enter it anyway (the money moved through the account), but it may not go to an expense account:

• Sole proprietor: a personal charge is an owner's draw — not deductible.
• Corporation: a personal charge is a shareholder loan / amount due from the shareholder — which is exactly how those balances quietly snowball into the shareholder-loan trap.

The one genuinely wrong move is deleting or omitting the transaction. A mis-coded entry can be fixed later; a hole in the reconciliation is far harder to find — and looks far worse under audit.

What to record in each situation

Verify the number is actually valid

Even when a registration number is printed, that's not the end of it. A number that's fake, cancelled, or doesn't match the supplier will get your ITC denied on review — and you're the one who pays it back. The CRA runs a free GST/HST Registry where you can confirm a number is valid and active for the date of your purchase. For large or unfamiliar suppliers, it's worth the thirty seconds.

Source: CRA, "Confirming a GST/HST account number" — the GST/HST Registry lets you verify that a supplier's registration number is valid, which is required for a supported ITC claim.

Wes and the one-click GST

Meet Wes, who runs Copperline Electric, an incorporated electrical contracting business in Red Deer. Wes does his own books straight off the QuickBooks bank feed — it's fast, and he likes staying close to the numbers. To "not miss anything," he set the default sales-tax code so every expense has GST backed out automatically. Gas, tools, a laptop off a marketplace seller, coffees with clients, a few cash-only supply runs — all of it, GST claimed.

At year-end his accountant pulls the ITC detail and starts asking for receipts. A lot of them don't exist, and several that do have no registration number — including the laptop and the cash supply runs. The accountant has to reverse roughly $1,400 of input tax credits Wes had claimed with nothing to back them up. Worse, had the CRA found it first on a review, the same reversal would have come with interest and a much less pleasant conversation.

What should have happened

Same speed, none of the exposure:

• Set the default tax code to no-GST, and add the ITC only when a valid receipt is in hand
• Capture receipts at the moment of purchase — a photo texted in on the spot beats a year-end scramble
• Flag receiptless or numberless lines as he went, instead of silently claiming them
• Verify the number on the bigger one-off buys (like that laptop) in the GST/HST Registry

Wes would have claimed slightly less GST through the year — and kept every dollar of it.

The no-receipt, no-number checklist

• Enter every bank transaction — never omit one because a receipt is missing
• Default new/uncertain expenses to no GST; don't auto-extract tax you can't support
• Claim an ITC only with a compliant receipt — and the registration number on anything $100+
• Verify unfamiliar or large suppliers' numbers in the CRA GST/HST Registry
• Flag missing-receipt lines and chase them while the trail is warm
• Code clearly personal charges to draws (sole prop) or shareholder loan (corporation), not to expenses
• When the receipt arrives, true-up the GST and confirm the category

Enter everything, claim only what you can prove

The awkward transactions aren't really one problem — they're three small decisions. Always enter the transaction. Deduct it if it's a genuine, reasonable business expense, even without a GST number. But claim the GST only when you can prove it was charged — with a compliant receipt and, at $100 or more, a valid registration number. Get those three straight and you'll keep every credit you're entitled to, and none that you're not.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute tax, legal, or accounting advice. GST/HST documentary requirements, thresholds, and income-tax rules apply to your specific facts and change over time. Consult a qualified professional before claiming input tax credits or deductions you're unsure about.

Primary sources, linked so you can read and interpret them yourself. Government and legislative links open on official Government of Canada websites.

• Input Tax Credit Information (GST/HST) Regulations (SOR/91-45) — the document fields required at each dollar tier
• CRA — GST/HST Memorandum 8-4, Documentary Requirements for Claiming Input Tax Credits
• CRA — Confirming a GST/HST account number (the GST/HST Registry)
• CRA — Keeping records, and Income Tax Act section 230 (books and records)
• Related reading: No Valid Invoice, No ITC (the field-by-field rules), the receipt-capture habit, and The Shareholder Loan Trap (where personal charges end up)

About the author

Rodney Maiato

Rodney Maiato is the founder of CDL Accounting Solutions, a remote bookkeeping practice helping Canadian incorporated small businesses keep clean, audit-ready books without the year-end scramble. He brings 15+ years in accounting — from junior accountant to assistant controller, where he managed a team of 7 and oversaw the books of 25+ companies, plus payroll for 100+ employees across several provinces — and is a Payroll Compliance Professional (PCP) Candidate with the National Payroll Institute. He also builds the automation behind CDL, including its text-in receipt intake system.