If he is planning on filing taxes, receipts come in pretty handy......

Yes, we have a written contract. The agreement is for a fixed price plus cost of materials. Except now apparently there are no receipts for any of the materials, like the shower kit, floor heating kit, or caesarstone.

When it was all said and done, we received receipts for everything. It was all accounted for. Something seems fishy to me.

Simply no receipts no reimbursement.

A lump sum contract will never have receipts viewable by a homeowner. The important number us the bottom line price. How the contractor arrives at the bottom line is his business, not yours. The exception to that documentation being transparent would be an allowance, where he needs to charge you the price of the selection, plus the profit, plus the change order fee.

If the contract was well specified, with brands, names, and model numbers, and the contractor is making substitutes of similar quality and performance, that is generally an allowable substitute, as equivalency substitutions are allowable if written into the contract.

If he is substituting lower quality specified materials, then look to the methodology of contract disputes written into the contract. If there is none, then fraud becomes a civil matter, with you needing to prove his intent to defraud in a courtroom situation if you can find no amicable solution outside the courtroom.

If your contract specified brands, etc then you should have gotten that.

Regardless of that if you have a contract with a licensed contractor then I would contact the regulatory commission in your area.

Does anyone here know if a contractor who purchases goods has to charge tax/pay tax on them? Is the dependent on the state you are in?

BS on the "we don't have receipts" claim.

If you want to call his bluff, any retail store can produce copies. I spent the better part of a day once, going around town to get copies when the company credit card had a bunch of charges that appeared suspicious and the employee had no receipts but claimed they were for certain supplies. If you've got the credit card used, it's easy peasy.

Online vendors store receipts online, if that's how he purchased stuff.

Thanks for the replies all. He suddenly says he has receipts, although we haven't received them yet. We're withholding payment until we receive the receipts.

We want to see what receipt he will produce for the floor heating kit because we had asked for Ditra-heat and he billed us for Ditra-heat (without the receipt), but we saw a box, cables and labelling that said Warm Up. That's when we started pushing for receipts. Now he is saying that Ditra doesn't make cables, so they had to get Warm Up. Our understanding is Warm Up is cheaper than Ditra, so if we were getting billed for Ditra, Warm Up should be cheaper.

Unfortunately some of the materials (like the heating kit) weren't purchased with our credit card, so there's no way to go to any stores to request a copy of the receipt, even though we know where they bought it because we saw an envelope with the store name with the Warm Up heating kit box that they left behind.