The original Rosebery desk used to collect a cardboard tray every Friday. Invoices, dockets, a crumpled fuel receipt from a ute, a health-fund remittance the principal had photographed on the clinic stairs. Nobody called it a “source-document protocol”. It was how the file stayed a file.

Software has not repealed that job. It has made it easier to pretend the job is done. A bank feed that looks tidy is evidence of movement. It is not evidence of what was bought, why, or which tax treatment you took. The ATO’s working rule is five years. The practical rule is the same sentence the old firm used: keep whatever would let a stranger reconstruct the year without ringing you at dinner.

This essay is general information for Australian readers. It is not tax, legal or BAS advice. Retention periods and document rules sit on the ATO site and in the law. Confirm them for your entity before you throw anything away.

What the five-year rule actually is

The working habit in a good Australian file is five years from the date you lodge the return or activity statement that the record supports — not five years from the day you bought the printer, and not five years from 30 June. If you lodge the 2025 company return in March 2026, the clock for that year’s ordinary records runs from lodgement.

Some records outlive that clock.

• Assets. Keep the purchase invoice, the contract, the installation docket and any improvement invoices until five years after you dispose of the asset or it is written off. A treatment couch bought in 2019 and sold in 2026 still needs its paper in 2031.
• Tax losses. Keep the records that explain a loss for five years after you use it, not five years after you made it.
• Capital gains. Keep the cost-base file for five years after you dispose of the asset.
• Super and employees. Payday Super is in force from 1 July 2026 and the Super Guarantee is 12 per cent from 1 July 2025. Keep the pay records, ordinary-time-earnings workings and clearing-house evidence that would let you answer both a Fair Work query and a super guarantee query. Those files are not a BAS extra.

If you are unsure whether a folder can go to the skip, it cannot. Storage is cheaper than a reconstruction.

A source document answers four questions

For each material line, the file should answer: who was paid or who paid you, what was supplied, which entity was a party, and which tax treatment applies. A coffee-card statement answers none of those well. A supplier tax invoice answers all four.

That is the distinction the feed blurs. The feed says $1,848.00 BUNNINGS WAREHOUSE ASHFIELD. The source document says which entity’s card was used, whether the goods were timber for a job or a barbecue for the backyard, whether GST of 10 per cent is on the docket, and which job or account should carry the cost. Without that, your chart of accounts is decorative.

A source document is usually one of these:

• a tax invoice that meets the GST rules
• a recipient-created tax invoice, if you have a valid agreement
• a contract, lease, settlement statement or grant schedule
• a merchant or health-fund remittance that ties back to the invoices you raised
• a payroll summary, STP report and super receipt
• a logbook, travel diary or usage record that supports a private-use or fuel claim
• an email that is the actual agreement, not a chat about lunch

A screenshot of a bank rule is not on that list.

Bank feeds, statements and the thing in the middle

Reconcile to a PDF or printed statement, not to the live feed. Feeds skip days, duplicate lines and rename payees. The statement is the third-party record of the account. The feed is a convenience copy.

Keep the statements with the year. A company that cannot produce twelve months of statements for the trading account, the GST-offset account, the director’s card and the equipment loan does not have books a tax agent can use. It has a login.

Merchant settlements belong beside the statements. A café in Newtown that codes the daily Stripe or Tyro deposit as “sales” has understated income by the fees and often misstated GST on both sides. The settlement report is the source document for the lump; the till tapes or invoice file are the source documents for the mix of taxable coffee and GST-free basic food. See GST on mixed supplies.

Photos, emails and the complete page

Phone photos are fine. Incomplete photos are not. The ATO will accept a digital copy that is a true and clear reproduction of the original. That means the whole page, readable, dated, and stored where someone who is not you can find it.

A physiotherapist in Marrickville who photographs the top half of a $2,400 equipment invoice has not kept a tax invoice. The ABN, the words “tax invoice”, the GST amount and the supplier address live in the part she cropped to “save space”. The same applies to a faded thermal docket. Photograph it the week you receive it. Thermal paper fades inside the five-year window.

Emails can be records. The lease that was only ever sent as a PDF attachment is a record. The thread in which a client says “yeah go ahead” on a variation is a record if that is how you vary jobs. File them by year and by supplier or job, not in a personal inbox that will be locked when the phone dies.

What is not a record: a text that says “paid u”, a Facebook message about a cash job, or a photo of a whiteboard. If the transaction is material, get it onto paper or into a dated PDF.

Tax invoices are a specific species

GST is 10 per cent. To claim an input tax credit on a purchase of $82.50 or more (including GST), you generally need a tax invoice. The document has to show the prescribed information — identity and ABN of the supplier, what was supplied, the price, and the GST. For larger supplies the invoice also needs your identity or ABN.

A till receipt that does not say “tax invoice” and does not show an ABN is not enough for that claim. Ask for a proper invoice the week you buy, not the week the BAS is due. Simpler BAS does not relax this. It only reduces what you write on the activity statement. The credit still has to be supportable.

If you raise invoices, keep the ones you issued as well as the ones you received. Progress claims, variations and credit notes are part of the same pack. A tiler in Fairfield who cannot find claim 3 for a kitchen reno cannot explain why GST on sales moved.

Logbooks, cars and the private slice

Motor-vehicle claims die on missing logbooks. If you use the logbook method, you need a representative logbook — typically twelve consecutive weeks — showing odometer readings, journeys, purposes and the business-use percentage. That logbook generally lasts five years unless the use of the car changes in a way that makes the percentage a fiction.

Keep the odometer image at the start and end of each year anyway. Keep the fuel dockets if you also claim fuel tax credits on a heavy vehicle or on machinery. A ute used to drop the kids at school and then drive to site is not 100 per cent business because the logo is on the door.

Phones, home offices and laptops have the same shape: a usage record, a bill, and an honest percentage. The source document is the bill plus the note that explains the split. “I work from home” is not a note.

Asset records are a register, not a folder of vibes

A fixed-asset register should list each material item: description, supplier, date, cost (GST-exclusive and GST-inclusive), which account it hit, and where the invoice lives. When you sell or scrap it, add the date, the proceeds and the calculation.

Clinics accumulate couches, ultrasound units and fit-out. Tradies accumulate saws, scaffolds and utes. Cafés accumulate espresso machines that cost more than a month of rent. If the register is a Xero account with no invoices behind it, the depreciation worksheet at year-end is a guess, and a base-rate company paying 25 per cent is guessing with real money. A company that is not a base-rate entity is guessing at 30 per cent. Either way the agent will rebuild it.

Software licences, website builds and leasehold improvements belong on the same register. So do items you instantly wrote off. The concession does not delete the need to prove you bought the thing and used it in the business.

Digital storage that survives a login change

The five-year rule does not care that you changed from MYOB to Xero in 2024, or that the bookkeeper who “had it all in Dropbox” left. You must be able to produce the records.

A working digital tray looks like this:

1. One cloud folder per financial year, readable by more than one person.
2. Subfolders for bank statements, sales invoices, purchase invoices, payroll, assets, contracts, logbooks and ATO correspondence.
3. Files named 2026-03-14_supplier_invoice_1848.pdf, not IMG_4033.jpg.
4. A weekly habit of emptying email attachments and phone photos into those folders.
5. A backup that is not the same laptop.

If you use the software’s attachment feature, still keep a copy outside the subscription. Subscriptions lapse. Attachments go with them.

Paper is allowed. A labelled archive box for the year is still a system. A shoebox that only the owner can decode is not. The Rosebery weekly tray worked because someone else could open it.

What a review actually asks for

An ATO review or a tax-agent reconstruction does not start with your dashboard. It starts with a period, a class of transactions, and a request: show us the invoices, the contracts, the settlements, the logbook. If you can produce that pack in a day, the review is a correspondence job. If you cannot, it becomes a rebuild, and rebuilds are charged by the hour.

Not-for-profits have a second audience. A grant acquittal is a source-document exercise with a board attached. Keep the grant schedule, the invoices that match the approved lines, and the bank evidence. Dumping the grant into “sales” and hoping is how an association loses the next round.

A weekly habit, not a July excavation

The month-end close only works if the documents arrived during the month. Spend twenty minutes each week:

• photograph or file every tax invoice over a threshold you actually respect
• match merchant settlements to the till or the invoice file
• download statements at month-end, not six months later when the bank charges for a reprint
• name anything odd while you still remember it

Do that and the five-year rule is a filing question, not a personality crisis. The original firm’s promise of validated numbers for a BAS and a return lived in this tray. Bookkeeping practice is still that craft: paper, or pixels that behave like paper, kept long enough that a stranger can read the year aloud.