As an entrepreneur, you have to keep accounts, for example: sales invoices, purchase invoices, vAT declarations … Those are a lot of important documents that it is best to keep safe and sufficiently long, but how (long) then?
Digital documents 🌐
A Dexxter user wanted to replace his entire paper administration with digital documents. Naturally, he wanted to comply with all the rules and obligations in doing so. He wanted to be sure that Dexxter could help him with his digital concerns and raised his question in the Dexxter community.
Keepingsomethingdigital, is that enough? 🔎
Definitely and definitely! The digital version is perfectly accepted in tax audits. In fact, digital storage is even encouraged because it allows you to store indefinitely without loss of reading quality.
Keeping a restaurant receipt on paper for years to come? Chances are that in two years, you will barely be able to read what the receipt actually stated because ink simply fades on paper. Then you will have a tax audit where you are actually more concerned with deciphering what was on your restaurant receipts.
Are there any (form) requirements?
Simply put: you have to store something in a digital way so that you can display it legibly throughout the retention period.
In other words, if you were to save something in PDF, JPG, PNG … then you are sure that it has been saved in a digital form that will remain readable throughout the retention period. Indeed, the chances that PDF would no longer exist (or could no longer be opened presentable) are almost non-existent.
How long should I keep my accounts? ⌛
Here, there is no difference between the paper version or the digital version. The retention period is usually three years, but can exceptionally go up to ten years!
Fortunately, that ten-year term only counts if there is tax fraud, usually you can count on three years in a tax audit. So if the tax authorities want to audit your sole proprietors’ accounts, they basically have three years to do so, starting from 1 January of the assessment year.
Attention!
If you file (or fail to file) declarations late, the tax authorities will have extra time to check your accounts, the term is then extended to four years.
And Dexxter? 💪
Dexxter unburdens you! That’s because we automatically keep every document for as long as legally necessary.
Don’t worry about taking backups either, because we take backups and backups from our backups. Better safe than sorry.
Suppose you were to stop being a business owner and consequently discontinue your Dexxter subscription? Then you can simply question our support to send you all your accounting data files in bulk.
Although even that is not necessary, because even if you stop your subscription, we will continue to keep your documents (unless you explicitly question us to delete everything).
