How long to keep records — and what IRAS expects to see

Record keeping is the least glamorous obligation on the compliance calendar and the one that decides how painful everything else is. Good records make the annual return, the tax filing and any IRAS query routine; missing records turn each into an excavation.

The two five-year rules

• Companies Act. s199 requires every company to keep accounting records that sufficiently explain its transactions and financial position, retained for at least five years after the end of the financial year they relate to.
• Income Tax. IRAS requires records supporting your income and claims to be kept for five years from the relevant Year of Assessment ("YA"). Your FY2026 records support YA 2027, so they must survive until the end of 2031.

Because the IRAS clock starts at the YA rather than the transaction, the practical translation is: keep everything six to seven years from the transaction date and you will never be caught short. GST-registered businesses have an equivalent five-year requirement for GST records.

What to keep

• Invoices and bills — issued to customers and received from suppliers;
• Receipts and cash register records for cash takings;
• Contracts and agreements — they explain why money moved;
• Bank statements — every account, every month;
• Accounting schedules and the ledger itself — the workings that connect documents to the financial statements.

Two practical points from experience. First, download bank statements as they are issued — banks purge online history after a year or two, and retrieving old statements later costs time and fees. Second, keep business and personal money in separate accounts: mixed accounts make every record ambiguous and invite exactly the questions you want to avoid.

Organised means retrievable

The legal test is whether records sufficiently explain transactions; the practical test is whether you can produce the document for any line in your accounts within minutes when IRAS asks. A simple structure — one folder per financial year, subfolders for sales, purchases, bank and contracts, filenames with dates — outperforms any shoebox. If a bookkeeper maintains your ledger, agree who stores the source documents and in what structure; the obligation stays with the company either way.

The cost of getting it wrong

Unsubstantiated deductions and input tax claims can be disallowed outright, and failing to keep proper records is an offence under both statutes. The five-year floor is cheap insurance: storage costs nothing, reconstruction costs everything.