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We currently keep all our till rolls and invoices for 7 years.
Our till is on it's last legs and we are on the lookout for a new one. Most new ones only have till receipts for the customer not our records.
As we are now tax digital do we actually need to have a record to show the taxman?
Do you not have digital records? Most big businesses will be cashless but have a digital record of all transactions, I can't imagine anyone wants to go through hard copy receipts/invoices
Tell that to the VAT inspector… That’s a joy, I can tell you.
As a national charity, we keep digital and paper copies for a decade.
Seems excessive to me, but FD insists as did the one before.
All tills will have an electronic record that is unchangeable. Ask the providers how to access this record and store it on your computer system and it's back-ups. (You do have back-ups don't you)?
@mattbee Paper records are normally demanded if they think you have something to hide. Have you been a bad lad? 😉
(Sometimes they are required for a selection of tax-payers when they aren't looking for anything, though getting a bit uppity may raise suspicions).
Our company keeps paper records of all sales for 7 years - 100s of boxes of crap. All stored, at great expense, in a dedicated storage facility.
“mattbee Paper records are normally demanded if they think you have something to hide. Have you been a bad lad? 😉
(Sometimes they are required for a selection of tax-payers when they aren’t looking for anything, though getting a bit uppity may raise suspicions).”
We had the ‘random fickle finger of fate’ CIS inspection a few years ago and when the meeting was arranged they said “by the way, a VAT inspector will be coming along too.”
Nothing to hide and they didn’t find anything but it wasn’t the most pleasant experience.
All modern till systems store transactions digitally and produce downloadable statements, linked to card transaction data. 7 years will not take more than a few megabytes.
Most modern accountants will digitise and store paper invoices so you don’t have to, in addition to checking and storing your till data.
No more stacks of paper boxes 🙂
When the tax person comes a knocking they will tell you what they want to see and how they want to see it.
If you have digital copies, they will say I want to see this that and the other, you get those up on screen and or print off and hey presto.
They also had a USB that ran a program on our accounts PC and printed off a list of transactions they wanted to check. Basically they searched for transactions that looked could look dodgy and wanted to know what they were. (I guess they could do this remotely now that we are on Xero in the cloud now! Oooh Big brother, watching! Tin hat time?)
All quite simple if you haven't done anything wrong, I suppose..
Tough gig being one of them, I guess some places make them feel quite uncomfortable. They were nice and it went smoothly.