Invoices are records long after they are paid. What to keep, for how long, in what form, and why deleting old billing data is almost never the right tidy-up.
An invoice's job does not end at payment. It is the evidence behind your tax filings, the proof of what was agreed if a dispute surfaces later, the record a warranty claim is checked against, and the document a due-diligence process will ask for if you ever sell the business. Retention rules exist because tax authorities audit backwards: they can reopen past years, and the burden of producing records for those years is yours.
The practical consequence is that invoices - issued and received - should be treated as permanent-ish records with a deliberate deletion date, not as clutter to clear when a folder gets full.
Tax rules set the floor, and the floor varies: commonly around six years in the UK (from the end of the accounting period), seven years is the safe conventional figure in the US given how far back the IRS can reach in different circumstances, and EU member states typically require somewhere between six and ten years, with ten common for German-style bookkeeping rules. VAT records usually carry their own explicit minimum. These figures move and have exceptions - a business trading internationally should confirm each jurisdiction it files in.
Other clocks run alongside tax. Contract disputes can generally be brought for six years in many common-law jurisdictions (longer for deeds), so invoices documenting a large project are worth keeping at least that long after the relationship ends. Warranty periods, construction defect liability, and insurance requirements can each extend the sensible horizon for specific industries.
The simple policy that satisfies nearly everyone: keep everything for the longest period that applies to you, rounded up - for most small businesses that means seven to ten years - and delete on schedule after that, rather than never.
Nearly every jurisdiction now accepts digital records, including scans of paper originals, provided they are complete, legible, and reliably retrievable - some add requirements about unalterability or storage location, and VAT systems care that the digital copy preserves the required fields. "Reliably retrievable" is the operative phrase: a compliant archive you cannot search is, for audit purposes, barely an archive.
What to actually retain is broader than the PDFs: the invoice itself, credit notes, the record of payment against each invoice, and enough of the surrounding correspondence to explain anything unusual - a large credit, a written-off debt, a renegotiated amount. An auditor's questions are always about the exceptions.
Two failure modes account for most real-world record loss: invoices that exist only in an email account someone loses access to, and invoices that exist only inside a service that gets cancelled. Whatever system issues your invoices, make sure a complete export exists somewhere you control, on a schedule, and that closing an account is preceded by taking one final export.
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