Record keeping software: what a business must keep, and for how long

Record keeping software gets shopped for at an uncomfortable moment: a tax enquiry, a due-diligence request, an insurance claim, a grant audit. The question is never "do you have a system" — it is "can you produce this specific record from three years ago, today". That is a retrieval problem, and it is decided long before anyone asks.

The categories are boring and the discipline is short. Both are worth getting right once.

What businesses generally have to keep

• Financial records: invoices issued and received, receipts, bank statements, and the ledgers built from them. These carry the longest statutory retention almost everywhere.
• Tax filings and the working papers behind them.
• Employment records: contracts, pay records, working-time and leave records, and anything relating to a dispute.
• Contracts with customers, suppliers and partners, including the executed copies and their signature evidence.
• Corporate records: registrations, board minutes, share transactions — often for the life of the company.
• Sector-specific records, from safety inspections to client files, which have their own rules and are the ones most often missed.

Exact retention periods differ by country and by record type, and "seven years" is a rule of thumb rather than a rule. Check the periods that apply where you operate — the cost of keeping something too long is storage; the cost of destroying it too early can be a penalty.

Retrieval, not storage, is the thing being tested. Store records so that a person who did not create them can find one by date, counterparty and type — that is the query every auditor, lawyer and buyer actually runs.

What record keeping software should give you

• Structure: typed fields for the things you search by — date, counterparty, amount, category, reference number.
• Relations, so a payment points at the invoice and the invoice points at the contract instead of repeating names.
• History at field level: what a value was before it changed, and who changed it. For records, an edit trail is part of the record.
• Attachments on the record itself, so the scanned receipt lives with the entry rather than in a parallel folder.
• Saved views for the queries you repeat — this quarter, this supplier, everything unreconciled.
• Export of everything, in CSV or JSON, on demand. A record you cannot export is a record you have lent to a vendor.

Setting it up so retrieval is fast

1. List your record types and give each one a retention period, written down. This is the whole policy and it fits on a page.
2. Give every record a stable reference and a date field — those two are how everything is found later.
3. Keep raw records immutable and corrections visible. Overwriting a value is what makes a record set unusable as evidence.
4. Attach the source document to the entry at the moment of entry. Later never comes.
5. Test retrieval quarterly: pick a random month and produce three records cold. If it takes more than a few minutes, the structure is wrong.
6. Export on a schedule to storage you control, and check once a year that the export still opens.

Ettex Records is built for that shape: custom tables with typed fields and no code, relations between tables, grid, kanban and gallery views, saved views with per-view filters and ordering, formulas and rollups across related rows, revision history where every cell change is tracked and restorable, row comments, CSV import to turn an existing spreadsheet into a structured table, and export of any view as CSV or JSON. It is local-first — the data sits on your device and syncs encrypted between them — which for record keeping means the archive does not depend on a subscription staying active.

Where record keeping goes wrong

• Records in one person's account, unreachable the moment they leave.
• A folder structure by year and nothing else, so finding anything means opening twelve folders.
• Scans with no index — a thousand PDFs named by scanner date are storage, not records.
• Corrections made by editing the original, so the trail disappears exactly where it matters.
• No deletion either: keeping everything forever is its own liability under data-protection rules.

Record keeping software earns its keep on the day someone asks for one document from three years ago. Structure by how you will search, keep corrections visible, and export on a schedule you control.