Periods
Two rules decide whether your arithmetic is right. Both are short, both are in the statute, and both are routinely missed.
As of: 06.09.2026
Not on the date of the invoice, not on the day it was booked, but on 31 December of the year the record belongs to. Only from there do the years count, which for an invoice means 8.
An incoming invoice dated 3 February 2026 therefore has to be kept not until 3 February 2034 but until 31 December 2034. The difference is eleven months, and it always runs the same way: the period is longer than the invoice date suggests.
That is convenient, because it sorts. Everything from one calendar year comes free on the same day, whether it arrived in January or in December. A clear-out at the turn of the year therefore always takes a whole year and never half a filing cabinet.
AO § 147 Abs 3 · UStG § 14b Abs 1
For books it is the year of the last entry; for the annual accounts, the inventory and the management report it is the year in which they were drawn up.
For invoices the VAT act says it again explicitly, and it names the date of issue: the period begins at the end of the calendar year in which the invoice was issued. Not the day it reached you, and not the day you paid it.
That is the second rule, and it is the more uncomfortable one, because it applies without you doing anything and because nobody tells you that it has.
For as long as the records matter to a pending proceeding you are party to, they have to be kept. A tax audit, an open appeal, a legal dispute: in all of these the record stays, even if the period would long since have run out.
The period is not extended by a set number of months. It simply does not end until the matter is closed. There is no date here that could be worked out in advance.
The tax code additionally ties retention to the assessment period: the retention period does not expire in so far as, and for as long as, the records matter to taxes for which the assessment period has not yet run out.
This is not an exception for special cases but a second, quietly running schedule that can overtake the counted period. When you work a period out yourself, what you are working out is the floor.
When a document is archived, Vaultivo sets a retention date and names the basis beside it. It counts from the end of the calendar year the document belongs to, exactly as described above. The date of the document itself only identifies which calendar year that is.
Until September 2026 it worked differently: the count ran from the day of the document, and the suggested date fell correspondingly earlier. Documents archived before then still carry the date calculated at the time. A recalculation happens only if you change the document's own date or explicitly reset the period to the calculated value, at which point the date moves later in one step.
The second rule, because no archive learns that an audit has been scheduled at your premises. What Vaultivo offers instead is the legal hold: a document under hold cannot be deleted, whatever date it carries. You recognise the situation; Vaultivo holds the document.
And when nothing is running, nothing happens by itself either. An expired retention date deletes no document; it only makes visible that you would be allowed to.
Electronically is permitted, and for invoices the VAT act attaches a condition that holds for the whole retention period: the authenticity of the origin, the integrity of the content and the readability must be guaranteed.
Integrity does not mean the file has to sit somewhere. It means it is still the same file. A file converted on filing and then replaced is no longer intact; it is a transcript.
That is why Vaultivo never alters the original. What arrives is stored unchanged and stays that way; anything produced alongside it, such as a readable PDF rendition of a file that is not one, sits beside it and never in its place.
Whether a proceeding is running in your case that holds the period open is not something this text can answer, and neither can an archive. That is the question for your tax adviser.
What this text answers is the question before it: from when the counting starts, and that counting alone is not enough.