How many years to keep invoices in hospitality

"Do I really have to keep invoices from five years ago?" This is a question that arises every time a business moves, changes managers, or runs out of office space. And the honest answer is: yes, and usually more than five.

Keeping accounting and tax documentation is not optional. There are minimum legal deadlines, practical deadlines that should be respected beyond the law, and specific situations in hospitality that extend the recommended period.

General Framework: What are the Deadlines in Spain

There are three overlapping legal frameworks that apply to your restaurant's invoices:

Código de Comercio (Article 30) establishes the retention of books, correspondence, documentation, and supporting documents for six years from the last entry made in the books. In practice, invoices that support accounting entries fall under this.

Ley General Tributaria (Article 66) refers to the right of Hacienda (the tax agency) to check and settle tax debts. The general statute of limitations is four years from the end of the voluntary period for filing each tax. However, with interruptions (requests, claims), this period restarts.

Specific IVA regulations require invoices (received and issued) to be kept for the tax's statute of limitations, also generally four years.

Practical result? A restaurant must keep its invoices for at least six years, counted from the last entry of the fiscal year in which they were included. To simplify, many businesses round up to "seven years for safety".

Why Six Years Is Not Always Enough

There are situations where the deadline extends beyond the general one:

Negative tax bases or outstanding tax credits. If in any fiscal year you had a tax loss or IVA credits, you must be able to justify them for all the fiscal years in which you apply them. In practice, this can extend to 10 years or more.
Depreciable investments. If you bought an oven 8 years ago and it is still being depreciated, you will want to keep the original purchase invoice as long as the depreciation is ongoing.
Equipment warranties. Some professional appliances have warranties of 5 years or more; you need the invoice to make a claim.
Pending procedures. If you have an open inspection, an ongoing claim against a supplier, or a labor dispute related to a specific period, keep everything from the affected period until it closes.

The practical rule applied in many restaurants that have undergone inspection: better 10 years than 6.

What Documents Exactly

Not just invoices. The obligation covers all documentation that supports your accounting and tax declarations:

Received invoices (from suppliers, utilities, rent, professional services).
Issued invoices (yours to business clients or private events).
Cash register tickets and POS reconciliations.
Delivery notes (not fiscally mandatory, but useful for reconciliation).
Expense receipts for staff using corporate cards.
Contracts with suppliers, for rent, services.
Payrolls and labor documents (with their own specific deadlines, up to 4 years from contract termination for labor claims).
Investment documentation (equipment purchases, renovations).

Paper vs. Digital: What the Law Says

Here's the good news. For years, Spanish regulations have accepted the digital retention of invoices and accounting documentation, provided certain conditions are met:

Invoices must be kept "guaranteeing their authenticity of origin, integrity of content, and legibility" (Reglamento de Facturación, RD 1619/2012).
If the supplier issues you a paper invoice, you can digitize it and destroy the original, provided you use a certified digitization system or apply "homologation" criteria (electronic signature, hash, change control).
Electronic invoices (those born digital) are kept in the format in which they were received.

In practice, many restaurants maintain a hybrid approach: physical archiving for the current fiscal year (for convenience), and digital archiving of previous years in the cloud.

How to Organize Your Digital Archive

If you decide to go digital, there are a couple of practices that save a lot of time when an inspection arrives or when you need to find a specific invoice:

Structure by year + supplier:

/2024
  /Pescaderia Mar Norte
    /invoices
    /delivery-notes
  /Hortofruticola Sur
    ...
/2025
  ...

Consistent file names: 2024-04-128_pescaderia-mar-norte_invoice.pdf is much more useful than IMG_4521.jpg.

Backup in two places: primary cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive) + a local backup on a hard drive or NAS. And perform restoration tests periodically.

Full-text search: if you upload OCR-ed PDFs to a search engine, you can find invoices by content (a specific product, a supplier, an amount). If your management system digitizes with OCR, this comes free.

How to Leverage Your Archive Instead of Just Complying

The most interesting thing about having a digital invoice archive is not just complying with the AEAT, it's what you can do with that data:

Compare prices between suppliers for the same product over years.
See how your raw material cost evolves product by product.
Detect duplicate billings or payments for the same concept to two suppliers.
Reconstruct a month when needed for a claim.
Access in seconds from anywhere, not just from the restaurant office.

Transitioning from paper to digital is not just a matter of space; it's about freeing up the information you already have but was frozen in filing cabinets.

Conclusion

Legal deadlines: minimum six years, recommended ten. Applies to received invoices, issued invoices, tickets, delivery notes, and all accounting supporting documents.

What interests you is not just complying, but having that archive in a useful format. A shoebox full of slips of paper meets the deadline but is useless to you. An indexed and searchable digital archive meets the deadline and also helps you make decisions every month.

If you want to digitize the invoices you receive from today onwards and have a clean, searchable archive from day one, start with Sincrio.

This article is for general informational purposes and reflects the Spanish regulatory framework as of the publication date. Tax regulations change frequently, and there are particular situations (special regimes, regional communities, fiscal years with open inspections) that may alter the applicable deadlines. Consult your tax advisor before applying any criteria or deciding to destroy documentation.