How long you have to keep your administration, and where the gaps are

Seven years, ten for some records, counted from the end of the financial year. The rule is simple; keeping to it is not, because the records that go missing are the ones in a mailbox or in a tool somebody cancelled. Here is what has to be kept, in what form, and what it costs when you cannot produce it.

Seven years, and sometimes ten

The statutory retention period is an obligation rather than a guideline, and the term depends on the kind of records. Basic records are kept for seven years. Records on immovable property and records from the One Stop Shop system are kept for ten.

Basic records cover more documents than founders expect:

• The general ledger.
• The receivables and payables administration.
• The stock records.
• The purchase and sales administration, including your invoices.
• The payroll administration.

Where the clock starts

The term runs from the end of the financial year the records belong to. Your 2026 administration therefore has to be available until the end of 2033, which is well past the point where you change software, change bookkeeper or cancel a tool.

What a startup often fails to keep and has to keep

The classic gaps are not in the bookkeeping itself but around it.

• Invoices sitting in the mailbox of a founder who leaves the company.
• Exports from a tool whose subscription was cancelled, after which the environment is wiped a few months later.
• The underlying data of your invoicing system, and not just the pdfs that came out of it.
• The payroll administration of someone who left two years ago.
• The administration of an entity you no longer actively use, such as a dormant holding.

The pattern is always the same: the records sat in a system or a mailbox nobody owned at the moment it went away.

Digital is fine, in the right form

Invoices are kept in the form in which you sent or received them. A digital invoice is therefore kept digitally and not as a print, and a paper invoice stays paper, unless you scan it.

Scanning is allowed on conditions: the digital version has to be a correct and complete representation of the original and the authentication features have to be preserved. If that is the case you do not need to keep the paper. For the form in which you keep the rest of your administration you can also make arrangements with the tax administration.

A shorter term needs an arrangement

For some records a shorter term can be agreed, but not automatically and not for basic records: for that you contact your own tax office. Without that arrangement the term is the term.

The retention duty comes out of the duty to keep records

Retention is the second half of an obligation whose first half often gets skipped. You have to keep an administration from which your rights and obligations are apparent, and from which it can be established whether you paid the right tax. What belongs in it as a minimum is the same list as the basic records you keep for seven years:

• All income and expenditure, split into categories, so your general ledger.
• The receivables and payables administration.
• The stock records.
• The purchase and sales administration.
• The payroll administration.
• Data relevant to the taxation of others.

That last point is the least known one. If you hold data relevant to the taxation of someone else, such as amounts you paid out to third parties, that belongs in it too.

What you want to be able to hand over per year

In practice it works best to have one complete file per financial year, rather than data spread across five systems. A complete annual file contains:

• The trial balance and the general ledger for that year.
• All purchase and sales invoices, in the form in which they were sent or received.
• The bank statements for the whole year, reconciling to the general ledger.
• The returns filed with their payment records: VAT, payroll taxes and corporate income tax.
• The payroll administration, with the contracts, the payslips and the journal entries.
• The year-end close or the annual accounts, and the corporate income tax return based on it.

Files like that are exactly what an inspector asks for and what a due diligence requests. You build it once and use it twice.

What it costs when you cannot show it

The retention duty has no penalty of its own that arrives on a slip. It runs through the duty to provide information: if you cannot deliver what is asked for in an audit, that is punishable and can lead to a formal information decision or to a deduction not being accepted.

In practice the effect is more indirect and more expensive. Without the underlying document you cannot substantiate a deduction, and what you cannot substantiate you lose. That holds for the VAT on a purchase invoice you no longer have just as much as for a cost item from three years ago.

Why this is more than an archiving rule

Two moments make it concrete. In a tax audit you have to be able to make your administration available; if you cannot, it is not just an archiving problem but a problem with your duty to provide information, with a refused deduction as a possible consequence.

The second moment is a funding round. A due diligence asks for the history since incorporation as standard, and that is exactly the period in which most startups changed tools twice. Whoever can deliver, delivers in a day; whoever has to reconstruct it spends weeks.

What we do about this

We keep your administration in an environment that is in your name, so that when you switch you take your history and not just an export. Invoices and bank transactions arrive digitally and stay in their original form, and at the year-end close we lock down a complete file per year. What we do not do is tidy your team's mailboxes, so send purchase invoices to the administration rather than to someone personally.

In short

• Basic records seven years, immovable property and One Stop Shop ten.
• The term runs from the end of the financial year the records belong to.
• Keep invoices in the form you sent or received them; scanning is allowed on conditions.
• A shorter term is only possible by arrangement, and not for basic records.
• The biggest gaps are in mailboxes and cancelled tools, not in the bookkeeping.