What receipts to keep, and for how long

You have a shoebox. You also have a folder in your email called "stuff", a phone gallery with two hundred photos of crumpled paper, and a nagging sense that none of it is organised in a way that would survive anyone asking.

Keep anything that proves money moved, and what it moved for. Both directions. That's the whole rule, and it covers about ninety percent of what people get wrong, because most sellers keep the receipts for things they bought and almost none of the evidence for things they sold. How long you keep it is set by your country, it's usually longer than you'd guess, and you should find your country's current figure before planning around it rather than trusting any article, this one included.

The part worth your attention is the middle. Not "keep your receipts". You know that. What counts as a receipt when the transaction was a bank transfer with no reference, a subscription billed silently to your personal card, or ₹800 handed to a man loading a van.

The test is not "is this a receipt", it's "can you reconstruct this"

Think of it as a story you might have to tell eighteen months from now to someone who wasn't there and doesn't believe you.

The story needs five things: the date, the amount, who the other party was, what was exchanged, and any tax that was charged on top. A record that has all five is good enough whether it's a till slip, a PDF invoice, a screenshot, or a line you wrote in a notebook with a photo attached.

A record that's missing one of them is usually recoverable. A bank line saying "TRF 4,500" tells you the date and the amount and nothing else. Add "150 mailers, Ade at the packaging shop, Computer Village" in your own notes and it's now evidence. A photo of the mailers on your table, taken that day, makes it better.

That reframing matters because it stops you throwing things away for being the wrong format. A WhatsApp message from your supplier saying "sent, ₦4,500 for 150 mailers" is a receipt. A screenshot of an M-Pesa confirmation SMS is a receipt. The email confirming a $49 monthly plan is a receipt, and it's one almost nobody keeps, because a subscription never feels like buying anything.

Four piles, not one shoebox

One folder for everything is the same as no folder. Four is the smallest number that actually works.

Money out, things you consumed. Materials, packaging, postage you paid, market fees, ads, software, the domain, ingredients, thread, wax, bubble wrap. These get used up and they reduce your profit in the year you buy them.

Money out, things you kept. A sewing machine, a laptop, a camera, a display fridge, a market gazebo. Equipment is usually treated differently from consumables because it lasts more than a year, and the difference is real enough that a ₱18,000 machine and a ₱400 box of thread genuinely don't go in the same place. Keeping them apart at the moment of purchase saves you sorting a year's worth of receipts by memory later.

Money in. Every sale, with the date, the amount, and enough about the buyer to match it to a bank line. This is the pile people skip, and it's the pile that decides your tax, because you're taxed on what came in minus what went out and the first number has to come from somewhere.

Anything with tax on it. If a purchase or a sale has a tax line, it belongs in its own pile as well as its main one. The rules for what you can do with tax you paid, and what you must do with tax you charged, are separate from everything else and often have their own record-keeping requirements. Find out which apply to you before you need them.

If four piles sounds like a system you won't maintain, it is, unless it's four folders you can drop a photo into from your phone in nine seconds. Keeping records when you hate paperwork is the ten-minutes-a-week version of this that people actually stick to.

The receipts nobody keeps

Here's where the money is. Every one of these is a real cost that reduces what you owe, and every one of them routinely goes unrecorded.

• Cash at markets and wholesalers. Stall fees, van loading, a porter, a cash discount for paying in notes. Nobody hands you paper. Photograph the money in your hand if you have to, or write it in the same notebook every time, on the day.
• Subscriptions on your personal card. The design tool, the cloud storage full of product photos, the scheduling app, the shop plan, the font licence. They renew silently and they add up to more than you think. Search your card statement for every recurring line once a year.
• Postage you paid and didn't charge for. If shipping cost you £3.29 and you charged the buyer £2.95, the difference is a cost. Four hundred parcels later that's a number worth having.
• Payment fees. Take the total off your statements rather than calculating it from a rate. Fees have fixed components, cross-border components and currency spreads, and the rate on the marketing page is rarely the number that left your account.
• Mobile money and wallet charges. The transaction charge on an M-Pesa or GCash transfer is a cost of getting paid. It's in the SMS. The SMS is a record.
• Samples and giveaways. The free candle you posted to someone with an audience cost you materials and postage, and it was a marketing spend.
• The bit of your phone and internet the business uses. Apportioned honestly, and with a note of how you worked out the fraction. A quarter is a fine answer if a quarter is true and you wrote down why.
• Travel to buy stock or work a market. Most countries allow a per-mile or per-kilometre figure; find your country's current rate and keep a log of journeys, because a rate without a log is worth nothing.

None of that is aggressive. It's the actual cost of running the thing.

How long to keep it

This is the question in the title and it's the one I can't answer for you, deliberately.

Retention periods are set nationally, they differ for tax records versus company records versus employment records, they're longer than most people assume, and they get changed. Several countries also extend the period if a return was late or if there's an open enquiry, which means the honest answer is "longer than the headline number in some circumstances."

So: open your own tax authority's site, find the retention period for business records for a self-employed person or a small company, write it in a note with today's date, and set a calendar reminder to check it again in a year. That's a ten-minute job and it's the only version of this answer that will still be true in three years.

What I can tell you is the shape of it. Nobody's retention period is measured in months. It is measured in years, and it starts running from a date connected to the filing, not from the date on the receipt. So the receipt from a January purchase is not safe to bin at the end of that year, which is exactly the mistake people make when they finally tidy up.

Retention runs from when you filed, not from when you bought. That's the detail that turns a tidy-up into a problem.

Marcus, restored chairs, Cleveland

Marcus buys mid-century chairs at estate sales and Facebook Marketplace, strips and reupholsters them in his garage, and sells them at $180 to $400. Last year he sold 61 pieces for $16,240.

His receipts, or the absence of them, looked like this.

What he spent on	How it was paid	What evidence existed
Chairs at estate sales, $2,900	Cash	Almost none
Fabric and foam, $3,180	Card, one supplier	Good, emailed invoices
Webbing, tacks, glue, sandpaper, $740	Card, six different shops	Till slips, mostly faded
Gas for pickups, roughly 3,000 miles	Card	Card lines, no journey log
Van hire, 9 days, $1,215	Card	Emailed receipts
Storage unit, $95/mo	Auto-debit, personal card	Statement lines only
Shop plan and domain	Auto-debit	Two emails he'd deleted

The fabric was fine. Everything else was a problem, and the two expensive problems were the cash and the mileage.

The estate sale cash was $2,900 of genuine cost with nothing behind it. He'd been paying in notes because sellers preferred it and the price was better, which was a good decision commercially and a bad one on paper. The fix took him about four seconds per purchase once he started: photograph the chair next to the handwritten price, in the driveway, before it goes in the van. Date stamp, item, amount, and a face he could name if pushed.

The mileage was $3,000-odd miles with no record of where or why. He knew the trips happened. He could not show it. A phone note with a date, a destination and a round-number mileage would have made every one of them defensible, and he was doing zero seconds of work per trip instead of fifteen.

The storage unit is the one that annoyed him most. Ninety-five dollars a month, twelve months, $1,140 of straightforwardly deductible cost, sitting on a personal card statement mixed in with groceries. Not lost, exactly. Just an evening of scrolling to prove.

Two accounts would have removed that entire evening. Separating business and personal money covers why one account is the most expensive habit in small retail, and it's fixable this afternoon without registering anything.

Paper fades, and phones die

Two failure modes that have nothing to do with discipline.

Thermal paper — the shiny slips from card terminals, market stalls, petrol stations, post offices — fades. Not over decades. Over months, faster in a hot car or a sunny window. Photograph a till slip the day you get it, because in eighteen months it will be a blank grey rectangle and the fact that you filed it neatly in the right envelope will not help you at all.

And a phone gallery is not a filing system. It's a filing system with one point of failure and no search. Photos are fine as the capture step. They're not fine as the storage step. Get them off the phone and into something with folders and a backup, weekly, on the same day you do everything else boring.

Name the files so the future version of you can find one. 2026-03-14-fabric-supplier-318.jpg takes four extra seconds and turns a folder of 400 images into something you can actually search.

What Sailo can and can't do for your records

Sailo records what came in. Every order sits in your dashboard with its date, its items, its total and the rail it came through, whether that was a card charge, a bank transfer you confirmed by hand, or an order that arrived through WhatsApp.

It has no idea what went out. Not one of your costs exists inside it. Sailo has never heard of the fabric, the postage, the storage unit or the estate sale cash, and it will never produce a profit figure or a tax figure, because it only ever sees half the equation. If you want profit, that's a separate exercise, and working out if you are actually profitable does it properly.

The limitation worth planning around is the analytics window. The free plan keeps 7 days of history, Pro keeps a year, Business keeps three years. No country's record retention period is 7 days. Which means if you're on the free plan, your own sales history ages out of the product long before you're allowed to stop being able to produce it, and the responsibility for keeping a copy is entirely yours.

CSV export arrives on Pro at $19 a month. On the free plan you're copying orders by hand into a spreadsheet, and copying by hand is a job people don't do. If you're going to stay free, put a monthly reminder in your phone and treat that export as non-negotiable, because the alternative is a gap in your money-in records that no amount of receipts for money-out will fix.

For the sales side of the story, an invoice is a stronger record than an order line, and invoices that get paid covers what has to be on one.

Start with this week, not last year

Do not begin by sorting the shoebox. That's a Saturday, it's demoralising, and it's the reason this never gets started.

Begin today, going forwards. Make four folders in your phone's cloud storage, named for the four piles. Every purchase and every sale from today gets photographed or forwarded into one of them within a day. Give it a fortnight and it stops being a task.

Then, separately, do three things that recover the past cheaply. Search your card statement for recurring subscriptions and write the list down. Download twelve months of bank statements as PDFs and put them somewhere safe, because your bank won't keep them available forever either. And export your orders out of whatever you sell through, today, whatever plan you're on.

Last, open your tax authority's site and find one number: how many years you're required to keep business records, and what date the clock starts from. Write it down with the date you looked it up. If you're still working out whether any of this applies to you yet, do you need to register your business is the question that sits above this one, and what to do about tax on online sales explains why profit, not turnover, is the number all of this is feeding.