Keeping the receipt

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

My phone stores receipts more efficiently than I ever stored paper ones. A purchase can be found by date instead of excavated from the bottom of a bag. When a kettle stopped working, I located the record in seconds and arranged a return. I was grateful for a system that remembered a small transaction more faithfully than I did.

Yet the digital record sometimes makes buying feel strangely weightless. Money leaves, an email arrives and the object joins the house without much ceremony. When I cleared an old drawer, I found a faded receipt from my first bicycle. The price looked small now, but I remembered how long it had taken to save. I do not want a return to drawers full of paper. I want to preserve the distinction between an efficient record and a meaningful one. A searchable date can prove what I paid; it cannot, by itself, explain what the purchase meant.

Source B: an original letter in a nineteenth-century voice. This is a period-voice simulation, not an archival document.

Dear Brother, I have begun keeping every household receipt in a small book. You laughed at the care with which I pasted in the grocer's account, but a sum forgotten is not a sum unspent. At the month's end, the little papers contradict the comfortable impression that we have bought almost nothing. Bread, coal and repairs acquire a weight together that each purchase hides when considered alone.

There is another advantage. When a tradesman questions what has been paid, a dated receipt saves both parties the indignity of arguing from memory. I do not suggest that all dealings should begin in suspicion. On the contrary, a plain record can protect goodwill from a mistake. The book is not an ornament, nor a diary of treasured occasions. It is a modest defence against the mind's preference for remembering itself economical. I would rather discover an error among scraps of paper than in a quarrel with somebody whose honesty I respect.

Refer to the whole of both sources. Compare the writers’ perspectives on the value of keeping purchase records and how they convey those perspectives. Support your comparison with evidence from both sources.