How long to keep business records in New Zealand: the 7-year rule

New Zealand asks more of its record-keepers than its neighbours: seven tax years, extendable to ten, with location and language rules attached. The rules are old; the storage landscape they now govern (cloud accounting, offshore data centres, receipt photos) is not, and Inland Revenue has built an approval regime to bridge the two. Sources from Inland Revenue are listed in the Sources section.

Seven years, sometimes ten

All business records, paper and electronic, must be kept for at least 7 tax years ^[1] . The Commissioner can extend this to 10 years in particular situations ^[1] . The records covered run wider than many owners expect: invoices and receipts, bank statements, wage records, asset registers, stocktake records, and the working papers behind GST and income tax returns ^[1] .

For a business with a 31 March balance date, the records behind the 2025-26 year stay live until at least 2033. Seven years is past the lifespan of most thermal receipts, two phone upgrades, and at least one accounting software migration, which is why the format and storage rules below do the real work.

Location, language, and the cloud

Three constraints sit alongside the retention period ^[2] :

1. Place: records must be kept at a place in New Zealand, unless Inland Revenue approves otherwise.
2. Language: English or te reo Maori, unless another language is approved.
3. Offshore and cloud storage: storing records offshore, including ordinary cloud services, requires either your own IRD approval or the use of a third-party provider IRD has approved to hold taxpayer records offshore ^[3] .

The third point sounds alarming and mostly is not: the mainstream cloud accounting providers hold the relevant approvals, so a business keeping its ledger and attached documents in a major platform is compliant by construction ^[3] . The trap is informal storage: receipts photographed into a personal photo library or a generic overseas file-sharing service sit outside the approved regime.

Electronic records: the integrity tests

Paper and electronic records are equally valid ^[2] . For electronic systems, Inland Revenue’s standard practice expects ^[2] :

• transactions captured completely and accurately,
• systems secure from unauthorised access and data alteration, and
• records retrievable and readable for the whole retention period.

In other words, the question is not “is it digital?” but “is it trustworthy and durable?”. A receipt image attached to its ledger transaction inside an approved platform passes all three tests; a folder of unlabelled photos passes none of them convincingly.

What the 7 years must contain

Inland Revenue’s expectation is a full substantiation set ^[1] : invoices and receipts on both the income and expense side, bank statements for the business accounts, wage books and PAYE records for employers, asset registers with purchase documents, stocktake figures at balance date, and the working papers connecting GST returns and income tax returns to the underlying ledger. GST deserves particular care: input tax claims rest on valid tax invoices, and a return is only as defensible as the weakest document behind it. For businesses operating across the Tasman, note the asymmetry with Australia’s 5-year rule; the simplest cross-border policy is to hold everything to the New Zealand standard, since the marginal cost of the extra two years in a digital archive is zero.

Building a 7-year archive without trying

The 7-year obligation becomes nearly free when evidence is attached to transactions at the time they happen:

1. Capture documents on the day they exist, by photo or email forward, before fading and loss can occur.
2. Attach each document to its ledger transaction rather than a parallel folder structure, so any GST return line can produce its substantiation years later.
3. Stay inside approved storage: keep the archive in the accounting platform, not scattered across personal drives.
4. On software changes, export the attachment archive before closing the old subscription; the obligation survives the migration.

ExpenseFlow implements the first two steps as its core behaviour: receipts and supplier invoices are captured as they arrive, extracted and coded with the correct GST treatment, and synced into the accounting platform with the source document attached to the transaction. The archive Inland Revenue can ask about in year six builds itself in year one. ExpenseFlow does not change where the records legally live; it makes sure they exist, attached, and findable.