This loss may be down to the one in two (51 per cent) Australian taxpayers who misplace vital receipts needed to support their tax return.

Lost receipts are not only costing Australians significant sums of money, they are also impacting on our personal time. The average Australian taxpayer spends more than 2 hours looking for receipts and supporting documentation for their tax return, meaning that as a nation we spend more than 1,800 hours looking for lost receipts each year.

With many Australians becoming increasingly frustrated with the annual search for receipts and supporting documentation, Commonwealth Bank has developed a revolutionary new online virtual safety deposit box - NetBank Vault. In an Australian banking first, the new online virtual safety deposit box allows customers to save important documents such as pay slips, scanned copies of passports / drivers licenses and receipts in their online bank account, backed with the greatest online security.

With more than one in five (23 per cent) Australian taxpayers believing there's nothing they can do about lost receipts, many are seeing the benefits of being able to store receipts virtually. Looking forward to tax time 2013, the majority of Australian taxpayers say they can see the benefit of storing everything in one place, to help them save time looking for receipts (54 per cent) and to get a bigger tax return (31 per cent).