Issuing a correct invoice is half the obligation. The other half — whose consequences surface years, not days, later — is storing it so it can be retrieved intact and complete whenever an examiner asks. And a tax audit does not book an appointment at your convenience.
What must be kept
- The structured document itself — the invoice's XML as it was issued and cleared or reported, not merely its printed rendering. The printout is a view; the legal weight sits with the structured document, its stamp and its fields.
- The credit and debit notes linked to each invoice — a record without its corrections is an incomplete record.
- The supporting system trails: the counter sequence, and the submission log of what went to the platform and what came back.
The statutory period
The general rule in the Kingdom's VAT framework is to keep tax invoices and records for at least six years from the end of the tax period, with longer periods for special categories — capital assets and real estate among them — as the published regulations specify. Set your retention policy to the longest category that applies to you, and confirm the special cases with your accountant.
What sound storage requires
- Within what the regulations permit, geographically and technically: electronic storage and server location have their own provisions — make sure your technical arrangement (local or cloud) conforms.
- Integrity, not mere existence: a file modified after issue carries no evidential weight — which is exactly where the cryptographic stamp and the hash chain earn their place: any tampering is detectable.
- Practical retrieval: storage you cannot search by number, date and customer is not storage; an examiner asks for specific samples, not archive boxes.
- Backups and continuity of access even if you change invoicing systems — your old data remains your obligation.
Audit readiness, practically
Test yourself with one scenario: if you were asked today for a specific month's invoices from a past year — with their notes and submission log — how long would delivery take? If the answer is "days", your storage needs reworking before someone else asks the same question.
In alFatora every document stays in its structured form with its notes and submission history, searchable and retrievable for the full retention period — exporting an audit sample is a matter of minutes, not days.
Was this useful? Review alFatora on Google.
