Receipt retention rules for trades: how long to keep what

Under Swedish law you must keep accounting records, including every supplier receipt and invoice, for seven years after the end of the calendar year in which the financial year ended (bokföringslagen 1999:1078, chapter 7, section 2). A photo of a paper receipt does count, provided the image is complete, legible and stored so it cannot be quietly altered. And since 1 July 2024 you no longer have to keep the paper original for years after scanning it: once the information has been transferred to digital form without loss, the paper may be destroyed. That single change is why photographing receipts in the van is now normal practice rather than a compliance risk.

The seven-year clock, and when it actually starts

The most common mistake is counting seven years from the date on the receipt. It runs from the end of the calendar year in which the financial year closed.

Say you buy a drum of cable on 14 March 2026 and your financial year is the calendar year. The financial year ends 31 December 2026. Seven years from the end of that calendar year takes you to 31 December 2033. So a March 2026 receipt lives for nearly eight years in practice.

If you run a broken financial year, say 1 May 2025 to 30 April 2026, the year ends inside calendar 2026, so the clock still runs to 31 December 2033. Everything in that year retires on the same day. That is deliberate: it means you can archive by financial year rather than by document.

Seven years is the accounting minimum. Other rules can outlive it. If you have taken a ROT deduction, if a job is under a ten-year defects liability, or if you are sitting on a dispute, keep the paperwork until the longest applicable period has run out, not the shortest.

Does a photo of a supplier receipt count?

Yes. The law does not care about paper. It cares about räkenskapsinformation — accounting information — and it says that information may be kept in any of three forms: on paper, on an electronic medium, or on microfilm. A JPEG or a PDF on a server is an electronic medium. It has never been the case that a receipt had to be a physical object.

What the law does care about is that the information is durable and easy to read. In practice, a photo counts as a valid verifikation when:

• The whole document is in frame. No cropped totals, no thumb over the VAT line, no cut-off supplier name.
• It is legible. If you cannot read the amount six years from now, neither can an auditor. Flatten the receipt, get light on it, take it straight on.
• Both sides are captured if both sides carry information. A lot of builders merchants print terms and order references on the reverse.
• It cannot be edited without trace. The archive must be organised so the information is presented in a form that has not been changed. A photo dumped in the camera roll fails this in spirit; a photo stored against a job in a system with a timestamp and an audit trail does not.
• It stays available for the full period. A phone that gets replaced every two years is not an archive.

What a photographed supplier invoice must show

The photo is only as good as the document in it. A verifikation has required content under bokföringslagen chapter 5. If the receipt does not carry these, photographing it does not fix it.

• The date the document was compiled.
• The date of the business transaction — when you actually bought the goods.
• What it refers to — the goods or services, in enough detail to identify them.
• The amount.
• The counterparty — who you bought from.

To that, add what you need for VAT. To reclaim input VAT you need an invoice that meets the VAT invoice requirements: seller VAT registration number, VAT amount, VAT rate, and the buyer identified. A simplified invoice is allowed for small amounts, and a till receipt from a wholesaler usually is one. If the receipt does not show VAT separately, you cannot reclaim the VAT on it, no matter how sharp the photograph.

Two things the receipt will never carry, which you should add at the point of capture:

• Which job it belongs to. A receipt for 3 200 kr of consumables is useless in a margin review if nobody knows which flat it went into.
• What it was for, in plain words, when the line items are cryptic. Merchant SKUs are not a description.

Binning the paper: what changed

This is the part most guidance online is still wrong about, because it was true for a long time and then stopped being true.

The old rule under chapter 7, section 6 was that if you moved accounting information from one form to another — paper to digital being the obvious case — you had to keep the original form until the end of the third financial year after the year of the transfer. So the box of receipts in the loft had to stay in the loft for roughly three and a half to four years after you scanned it. Scanning saved you nothing on storage. It only added work.

That requirement was removed as part of the 2024 modernisation of bokföringslagen, in force from 1 July 2024. The position now is that once the information has been transferred to another form, the earlier form may be destroyed. No waiting period.

The condition is the one that always applied: nothing may be lost in the transfer. The digital version has to carry all the information the paper carried, and it has to be presentable in readable form for the full seven years. If your scan loses the reverse of the docket, you have not completed the transfer, and destroying the paper destroys accounting information. That is not a paperwork slip; it is a bookkeeping offence.

A sane rule of thumb: photograph, confirm the image is complete and readable and attached to the right job, then bin the receipt. Not photograph and bin in one motion at the counter. The gap between the two is where mistakes get caught. Bokföringsnämnden (bokforingsnamnden.se) is the body that issues the detailed general guidance here, and it is worth checking their current wording before you change your routine.

Storing records abroad, and what cloud means

Almost every trades app stores data in a data centre, and quite often that data centre is not in Sweden. Keeping accounting information abroad used to mean notifying Skatteverket, and in some cases asking permission. The 2024 changes eased this substantially. The test today is availability rather than geography: you must be able to present the information in Sweden, in readable form, immediately, for the whole retention period.

What that means for choosing a system:

• You must be able to export. If your supplier goes under or you switch, the seven-year duty is still yours. Ask for the export before you sign, not after.
• You must be able to read the export. A proprietary blob nobody can open is not readable form. PDFs and images are.
• Deletion is not the supplier's call. If the system purges attachments after two years to save storage, it is not an archive.
• Access must survive staff turnover. Records tied to one leaver's personal login are a problem waiting to happen.

A field workflow that actually holds up

The compliance rules are easy. Getting a sparky to follow them at 16:45 on a Friday is the hard part. The routine that survives contact with a real van:

1. Capture at the counter, not at the desk. The receipt is never more legible than it is right now, and the memory of which job it was for is never fresher.
2. Attach it to the job, not to a folder. The job number is the only index that matters later — for the seven-year archive, for the margin, and for the ROT claim.
3. Let it queue offline. Merchants have terrible signal. If capture requires a connection, capture does not happen, and you get a glovebox of thermal receipts fading to blank by August.
4. Split one invoice across the jobs it covers. A single wholesaler invoice for three jobs is normal. Forcing it onto one job quietly ruins the costing on the other two.
5. Reconcile monthly, not annually. Missing receipts are findable in week two and gone in month eleven.

This is exactly the shape of the supplier-invoice capture in OdinTask: photograph the invoice from the job card, it queues offline and replays when signal comes back, one invoice can be split across several jobs, and it syncs through to Fortnox or Visma. The archive obligation is still yours — no software takes that on — but the capture stops being the thing that fails.

If you are reading this outside Sweden

The principles travel; the numbers do not. Every developed tax regime now accepts digital images of receipts, and most have dropped any requirement to retain the paper original once a faithful copy exists. What differs is the clock.

Check the exact rule with your own revenue authority before you throw anything away. Retention periods are cheap to look up and expensive to guess at.

The short version: keep everything seven years from the end of the calendar year your financial year closed, photograph receipts whole and readable the moment you get them, tie each one to a job, and bin the paper once the digital copy is confirmed complete. If your receipts currently live in a glovebox, start a free trial and photograph the next one from the job card instead. More on running the admin side of a trades business on the OdinTask blog.