Business tower · floor

How long to keep business records, by the people who ask for them

There is a definitive answer to how long to keep business records, published by the organisations that would come and ask for them. It is worth noting who is not on the first page of Google for this question today: the tax authorities themselves. The results are a chamber of commerce, three accounting firms, a document-management company, a billing platform and a records service — all of them paraphrasing a source they do not link to.

Here is the source.

Read the framing rather than only the numbers. The IRS is not telling you how long to keep paperwork as a matter of tidiness. It is telling you how long somebody can still ask questions about a particular return — and the records are what answer them. That is why the periods differ: the window is longer when the potential error is larger, and it never closes at all if no return was filed.

It also means the clock starts at the return rather than at the transaction. A receipt from three years ago is not measured from its own date; it is measured from the filing of the return it appears on, and a return filed before its due date “is treated as filed on the due date”.

Put the two side by side and the practical warning writes itself. The American rule is a set of situations and the British rule is a single period from a fixed date. Neither is a version of the other, and neither converts. A retention schedule copied from an American accounting firm’s blog is the wrong schedule for somebody filing in the United Kingdom, and the reverse is equally true — which is exactly the failure mode of a question answered almost entirely by companies rather than by authorities.

That caveat matters more than it looks, because it moves the decision. The tax period is a floor rather than a ceiling. Employment records, insurance claims, contracts under which somebody could still sue, and anything touching property or equipment all have their own clocks, and several of them run longer than the tax one.

The practical version, for somebody who just wants to know what to do. Work out your own tax period from the authority that applies to you, not from a blog. Treat that as the minimum. Keep anything connected to property, equipment or a loan until well after you have disposed of the thing, because those records are what establish what it cost you. And keep filed returns themselves indefinitely — the IRS suggests it in a note rather than a rule, and it costs nothing.

Digital copies. Both authorities accept records kept electronically, and the practical risk shifts accordingly: not fire or damp but format and access. A file you cannot open, a cloud account you have stopped paying for, or an export nobody ever tested is the modern version of a lost box. If you are keeping something for five or seven years, keep it in a format that will still open — a PDF or an image rather than the native file of a product that may not exist by then — and keep a copy somewhere that does not require a subscription to reach.

GOV.UK also says what to do if the worst happens, and it is calmer than people expect: “If you cannot replace your records, you must do your best to provide figures”, telling HMRC at filing time which figures are estimated. Losing records is a problem to be declared rather than concealed, which is a useful thing to know before it happens.

Everything on this page is quoted from the two tax authorities, with the date each was read. Both apply only in their own country, and both change — which is why the date is on the page and why the right source for your own deadline is your own authority rather than any guide, including this one.

What this tower will not do

It will not give you one number for everybody. Two tax authorities publish two completely different structures, and a single answer is only ever right in one country.

It will not tell you the tax period is the whole answer. The IRS itself says to check whether insurers or creditors need them for longer, and that sentence is quoted above because almost nobody carries it across.

And it will not sell you document storage or accounting software, which is what several of the pages currently ranking for this question are for. What holds instead is simple: every period on this page is quoted from a tax authority — the Internal Revenue Service or GOV.UK — with the date it was read, and neither applies outside its own country.