Invoice Archiving in Switzerland: How Long Must You Keep Them?

Business documents, including invoices, must be retained for the period required by law. Get this wrong and you risk trouble in an audit or a dispute.

How long to keep records

Under the Code of Obligations (Art. 958f OR), business books, records and accounting vouchers must be kept for 10 years. This includes issued and received invoices.

The 10-year period runs from the end of the financial year in which the document was created or the transaction took place. A 2026 invoice is therefore kept until at least the end of 2036.

Tax-relevant documents should be kept for the same period to be safe. The Federal Tax Administration and cantonal tax offices may request records well after the year in question.

For VAT, the retention obligation also runs to 10 years in practice, so treat every invoice as a document you must be able to produce a decade from now.

• Issued and received invoices: 10 years.
• Bank statements and payment records: 10 years.
• Contracts and supporting documents: keep them with the invoices.

What counts as a business record

The retention duty covers far more than invoices. Account statements, payment receipts, expense vouchers, contracts and correspondence that supports an entry all fall under it.

Payroll records and documents relating to employees must be kept alongside the accounting records, as they support the wages shown in your books.

Records that evidence a right or obligation — a loan agreement, a lease, a warranty — should be kept for the same period, even if they are not strictly accounting vouchers.

When in doubt, keep it. The cost of storing a document for ten years is tiny compared with the cost of not being able to produce it in an audit or a legal dispute.

Digital or paper?

Electronic archiving is fully accepted, provided the documents are legible, unalterable and can be reproduced at any time. There is no legal requirement to keep paper originals.

Store the documents in a format that will still be readable in a decade. PDF/A is a good choice because it is designed for long-term preservation and does not depend on a specific application.

The archive must be protected against tampering and loss. Store it in more than one place, with at least one off-site or cloud backup, so a hardware failure does not wipe out ten years of records.

Make the documents searchable if you can. An archive you can query by date, client or number is worth far more in an audit than a folder of unsorted files.

Making archiving automatic

The easiest way to comply is to store every invoice digitally at the moment it is created, with a consistent naming scheme and a backup. Never rely on a single device.

Adopt a naming convention that includes the invoice number, client and date, such as "2026-014-client.pdf". A consistent scheme makes any document findable in seconds years later.

Archive outgoing and incoming invoices in the same system so the two sides of a transaction can be matched. This is also what an auditor will try to do.

Software that archives automatically removes the discipline problem entirely. Every invoice facturio creates is stored digitally from the start, so the archive builds itself as you work.

• Keep everything for 10 years from the end of the financial year.
• Store digitally in PDF/A with at least one off-site backup.
• Use a consistent naming scheme with number, client and date.
• Archive incoming and outgoing invoices in the same place.