Belegaufbewahrung (record retention)

The duty covers accounts, receipts and business papers as well as annual accounts, inventories and the statement of receipts and expenses. The Austrian business service portal (USP) gives an example: a purchase invoice dated 3 January 2017 had to be kept until 31 December 2024 and could be destroyed from 1 January 2025. Documents from 2019 can therefore go from 1 January 2027 at the earliest.

You keep documents longer while they matter for pending tax or court proceedings. For VAT purposes you generally keep documents about real estate for 22 years, in certain cases for twelve years (§ 18 Abs. 10 UStG). If your financial year differs from the calendar year, the period runs from the end of the calendar year in which the financial year ends.

You may keep documents on data carriers, scanned or stored electronically, if a complete, orderly, identical and true-to-original reproduction is possible at any time until the period ends (§ 132 Abs. 2 BAO). If a document exists only electronically, the true-to-original requirement does not apply. In an audit you provide, at your own cost, the means to make the documents readable.

For e-invoices, issuer and recipient must ensure authenticity of origin, integrity of content and legibility from issue until the seven years end. A paper printout is allowed. If you convert an e-invoice into another format, the stored data must show that the content has not changed.