What a Deposit Receipt Should Actually Say
A receipt that records an amount and a date proves a payment happened. What makes it useful later is the line saying what the money was for and what happens to it.
A deposit receipt is easy to get and easy to make useless. It records that money changed hands, which is the part nobody ends up disputing. What makes a receipt useful later is the line that says what the money was for.
An amount and a date prove a payment. They do not describe an agreement. Six months on, a receipt for four thousand dollars dated March 12 establishes that four thousand dollars moved on March 12, and it establishes nothing else.
The line that does the work names what the money is applied to. Deposit toward materials for the primary bathroom, applied against the contract price, is a different record than deposit received. The first one can be checked against the material that showed up in the garage.
A receipt should also say what comes next. The date work begins, or the event that triggers the following payment, turns the receipt into the first entry in a schedule instead of a standalone piece of paper in a drawer.
The line I would want on it is the one about what happens if the work does not go forward. Whatever the two people agreed to on that question, the receipt is where it gets written down while everybody is still friendly, which is the only time anybody is willing to write it.
Form matters less than people think. A signed line on the proposal, an emailed confirmation, or a page out of a receipt book all work, as long as both people hold the same version. What matters is that the record gets made at the time rather than reconstructed later out of memory and text messages.
A funded contract collapses the receipt into the agreement, because the scope of the work and the money for the work are the same object. The customer funds the contract before work begins. The money is held until each milestone is complete, and that portion releases to the provider. The record of the payment and the record of what the payment was for stop being two separate documents.
Rules about deposits and advance payments vary by state, and some states regulate them directly. This article is about what people commonly do, not about what any law requires. For what a specific state's rules actually say, see the deposit guides in the knowledge base.
The receipt is a thirty second job on the day it is written. It is the only thing you have on the day it matters.