Business Record Retention Schedule by Document Type (Free Reference Table)

A record retention schedule is a simple map of how long to keep each type of business document. This page gives you one, as a single table you can save, built on the retention periods the IRS publishes and the conventions accountants add for the records the tax rules do not put a number on. It is general information rather than advice on your particular situation, so treat the judgment calls, especially anything a contract or a state agency governs, as a question for your CPA or attorney.

The retention schedule

The tax-driven rows below come straight from the IRS guidance on how long to keep records; the others reflect common practice for records the IRS does not attach a specific period to.

The property rule most people miss

The property row is the one that trips up owners who think a three-year rule covers everything. The IRS says to keep property records until the period of limitations expires for the year in which you dispose of the property, because those records are what let you figure depreciation and the gain or loss on the sale. In plain terms, selling an asset starts a fresh multi-year clock on the asset's entire paper trail, including purchase documents and improvement receipts that may be decades old. If you rolled the property into a like-kind exchange, the same guidance says to keep the records on both the old and the new property until the period runs out for the year you dispose of the new one.

Employment tax runs on "whichever is later"

The payroll row hides a second detail. The IRS says to keep employment tax records for at least four years after the date the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later. That "whichever is later" language matters, because a tax you paid late resets the count to the payment date, not the original due date. It is also a separate clock from the income-tax windows, so a business with employees is tracking two retention periods at once.

Where QuickBooks breaks the schedule

The schedule assumes you can still reach the records when the request comes. If your books live in QuickBooks Online, that assumption has a hole. Cancelling a paid subscription puts the company in read-only mode for 12 months and then deletes it permanently, and a cancelled trial gets only 90 days. The retention periods in the table can run three, four, six, or seven years, and some records need to be kept longer or permanently, so the books can be deleted long before the obligation to produce them ends, and support cannot bring a deleted company back.

Exporting a copy first is the fix, but the built-in export is not a full archive. It leaves out the audit log, and when you pull attachments in bulk the files come out separately from the transactions they were attached to, so a plain export gives you a folder of receipts with no record of which entry each one supports. Rebuilding that linkage later, under a deadline, can be one of the harder parts of responding to a closed-business audit.

Keeping the schedule usable

A retention schedule only helps if the records behind it are still readable when someone asks. Two of our guides go deeper than the table can: how long to keep business records after closing walks the same windows in prose with a wind-down checklist, and the seven-year rule against your one-year QuickBooks access shows how far the retention clock outruns the deletion clock. If your books are in QuickBooks Online, the safe move is to pull a complete copy while the company is still open, and if you would rather not assemble it by hand, that is the archive we build for you: the full ledger, every report in cash and accrual basis, every attachment kept with its transaction, and the audit log, verified against your live company before you cancel.