Sales invoices - Option to delete invoices <6 years past
Under GDPR, customer data can only be kept for a reasonable period of time.
In the UK, businesses must keep tax records for at least five years from 31 January following the end of the relevant tax year. In practice, this means records need to be retained for 5 years and 10 months.
Your GDPR policy can therefore state that records will be kept for 5 years and 10 months. After this period, continuing to store invoices (for example, in Xero) could put you in breach of GDPR.
To help businesses stay compliant, Xero could offer an optional feature that allows customers to:
Automatically delete invoices on 1 February each year if they relate to a tax year more than five years old.
Automatically delete contacts where no active invoices remain (because the related invoices have already been deleted).
This would help UK customers remain GDPR compliant without needing to manually void old invoices and delete customer records.
Appreciate wanting an automated means to simply this process for you. Right now, as I'm sure you've found you can manually delete draft invoices, or Void to remove Approved invoices in your organisation.
It's not something we have direct plans around atm, but we'll get a better sense from the wider community here of others that'd find an automated tool useful for this type of scenario. Thanks