How long to keep invoice records

Five to seven years in most countries: six under India GST, six for UK VAT, three or more for the US IRS. Retention periods and what counts as a record.

Whatever the figure where you are, it is longer than a phone lasts. That is the practical point: a record kept only on a device you will replace in three years is not a record, it is a temporary copy.

Export a backup periodically and keep it somewhere that survives the device — a cloud drive, a laptop, an email to yourself. Do the same with the PDFs you send.

The common periods

• Ten years: Germany, France, Italy, and the Philippines.
• Seven years: New Zealand, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Japan.
• Six years: the UK, Canada, India (effectively), Nigeria.
• Five years: Australia, Singapore, South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, the UAE.
• Three to four years: most US states, and Spain.

Longer periods often apply to specific categories — property, capital assets, and anything involving a dispute or an open assessment. The UAE requires fifteen years for real-estate records; several countries extend for capital goods.

Keep seven years as a default and you are covered nearly everywhere. Ten if you are in Europe.

What "keep" actually means

The document, not a summary of it. A spreadsheet showing that invoice 1043 was £3,708 is not a record of invoice 1043 — an inspector asking for records means the invoices themselves, in a legible, reproducible form.

This is the practical reason to hold invoices somewhere that stores the document rather than the total. It is also why "I had it on my old phone" is not an answer.

Digital is fine everywhere

No major tax system requires paper originals of invoices you issued. Several go further and require digital — the UK's Making Tax Digital, Italy's electronic archive, Germany's GoBD storage rules, and mandatory e-invoicing regimes in Mexico, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

Some of those carry integrity requirements: the record must be stored in a way that shows it has not been altered. For an ordinary small business, keeping the original PDFs unmodified satisfies this in practice.

Keep the ones that were not paid

Cancelled invoices, credited invoices, bad debts and estimates that went nowhere. Retention applies to them too, and the cancelled ones matter most — they are what explains a number in your sequence that has no payment against it. Deleting them creates exactly the gap an inspector will ask about. How to number invoices covers why.

The realistic failure mode

Not a fire in an office. A phone that died, an app that was uninstalled, a laptop that was replaced, a cloud account that lapsed when a card expired. Seven years is long enough that you will change devices two or three times inside it.

Which makes an annual export worth doing deliberately: one file per year, kept somewhere that is not a device you carry. Moving your records to a new phone and losing a phone both come down to this one habit.

When the clock starts

Rarely the invoice date. More often the end of the tax year or accounting period it falls in, and sometimes the date a return was filed. A six-year rule can therefore mean nearly seven and a half years from the invoice. Round up rather than calculating finely — the storage costs nothing and the assessment does not.

Primary source: HMRC on how long the self-employed must keep records. Periods vary by country and by document type — the table above is a starting point.

EstimateBill does this on your phone with no account and no internet — the invoice is built, the PDF is made and the record is kept entirely on the device. See how it works, or build one in your browser first.