The tax clock and the subscription clock disagree

The request is ordinary. Your accountant, or a letter, asks for the invoices behind one line of a return you filed two years ago. You know exactly where they were: in the invoicing tool you used at the time, the one you cancelled when you moved to something cheaper. You still have the login, and it still works. The invoices are not behind it.

Nobody deleted anything on purpose. The tool kept the records for as long as its help centre said it would, and the help centre and the tax authority were never talking about the same length of time.

This article is about that gap. It uses the United States federal rules as its worked example, because they are written down in one short list and the list is easy to hold up against a vendor's page. If you are somewhere else, your numbers differ and the shape does not. I am not a lawyer, none of this is advice about what you must keep, and everything below comes from pages I read on 8 September 2026: three from the Internal Revenue Service and fifteen from eleven software companies.

What the list says, all seven lines

The IRS page on how long to keep records has a list of seven items. Read it whole: the versions that circulate usually stop at the first one.

1. Keep records for 3 years if situations (4), (5), and (6) below do not apply to you.
2. Keep records for 3 years from the date you filed your original return or 2 years from the date you paid the tax, whichever is later, if you file a claim for credit or refund after you file your return.
3. Keep records for 7 years if you file a claim for a loss from worthless securities or bad debt deduction.
4. Keep records for 6 years if you do not report income that you should report, and it is more than 25% of the gross income shown on your return.
5. Keep records indefinitely if you do not file a return.
6. Keep records indefinitely if you file a fraudulent return.
7. Keep employment tax records for at least 4 years after the date that the tax becomes due or is paid, whichever is later.

IRS, How long should I keep records?, page last reviewed or updated 30 June 2026

Only one of the seven says a plain three years, and even that one holds only if three of the others do not apply. Two of the seven say "indefinitely". One says "at least". And the first line of the list is a cross-reference: whether three years is enough depends on facts about your return, some of which are only settled when the return is examined.

The clock also starts later than people assume. The page says the years "refer to the period after the return was filed", and that "Returns filed before the due date are treated as filed on the due date". A receipt from January 2024 is attached to a return filed in 2025, and the three years run from then.

Two more sentences from the same page do quiet work. On property:

"Generally, keep records relating to property until the period of limitations expires for the year in which you dispose of the property."

A laptop bought in 2021 and sold in 2027 carries its purchase records to the return for 2027, filed in 2028, and three years beyond that. And on everyone who is not the IRS:

"When your records are no longer needed for tax purposes, do not discard them until you check to see if you have to keep them longer for other purposes. For example, your insurance company or creditors may require you to keep them longer than the IRS does."

That sentence is the tax authority telling you its own list is a floor.

The rule that never mentions your vendor

Publication 583, revised December 2024, has a passage on electronic records that is the closest thing in the source material to a sentence about software:

"All requirements that apply to hard copy books and records also apply to electronic storage systems that maintain tax books and records. When you replace hard copy books and records, you must maintain the electronic storage systems for as long as they are material to the administration of tax law."

IRS, Publication 583 (12/2024), Starting a Business and Keeping Records, "Electronic records"

The same passage requires that the system "index, store, preserve, retrieve, and reproduce" the records "in legible format". Every such system must "provide a complete and accurate record of your data that is accessible to the IRS".

Read who the subject of those sentences is. You must maintain the system. The system must retrieve and reproduce. Nothing in the passage asks who hosts the system or on what terms. To the authority, the filing cabinet you rent and the one you own are the same cabinet. The retention window of the company that hosts your books is your problem, and the IRS does not know it exists.

So the useful question is what those windows actually are. I went and read them.

Kept and reachable are different words

The vendor pages describe something less tidy than "the software deletes your records after a year or two". Far more often they describe a vendor that still has the records and a customer who cannot get at them.

Stripe is the clearest case, because it documents both halves. On one help page:

"In live mode, users can only access events created within the last 13 months from the Dashboard. Events older than 30 days will only provide a summary view. Events within the last 30 days will be fully visible via the API and Dashboard."

Stripe, Stripe event retention period

On another, written for merchants covered by Japan's Electronic Record Retention Law:

"Stripe retains transaction data for 10 years from the transaction date."

Stripe, How Stripe complies with the Electronic Record Retention Law

Ten years kept, thirteen months visible, thirty days at full detail. Those are three different facts about the same data, and only the first one sounds like the tax list.

Xero says the same thing in one paragraph, and says it about the day you stop paying:

"If you cancel your subscription, the data in that subscription will be archived and held in the Xero platform in accordance with our data retention policy. While archived, data held within the subscription cannot be accessed by anyone. If you prefer, you can request for the data to be deleted. Once a subscription has been cancelled in Xero, you will still be able to get access to the data in the future for up to seven years, unless you request it to be deleted. This can be done by reactivating the relevant subscription."

Xero, common questions, under "What happens to my data if I cancel my subscription?"

Seven years reaches the far end of the IRS list. And "cannot be accessed by anyone" is exactly what it says: the route back to your own ledgers is a new subscription. The records survive as a feature of a plan you are no longer on.

That shape repeats across the vendors below. Deletion happens, and I will get to the vendors where it does. But the more common failure is a record that exists, that you can prove exists, and that you would have to pay to see.

Eleven help centres, one table

I read the help-centre pages of eleven vendors a small business is likely to be running some part of its money through. For each, two questions: how far back can you see or export, and what happens when you stop paying or stop logging in. What follows is what the pages said on 8 September 2026. Help pages change without notice and none of this is contract text.

Vendor	How far back you can reach	The condition attached
Stripe	events for 13 months in the Dashboard, full detail for 30 days; transaction data retained 10 years	the 10-year figure is stated for Japan's record-keeping law
PayPal	activity for the past seven years	12 months per report, 50,000 rows per file
Square	transaction search reaches one year back	from the date of the search
QuickBooks Online	audit log for two years; after cancelling, read-only access for one year	resubscribe within 12 months or the data is no longer available
Xero	up to seven years after cancelling	only by reactivating the subscription
Zoho Books	view-only after cancelling, no end date	deleted after 120 days without a login
Shopify	store data "guaranteed for 2 years" after deactivating	reactivate to reopen, or to contest a chargeback
Wave	nothing after you delete the account; payment history kept "for a certain period"	deletion is yours to trigger and cannot be undone
FreshBooks	"intact and preserved" after cancelling	deleted after 30 days of inactivity, on the same page
Slack, free plan	90 days visible	permanently deleted after one year
Google Workspace	a deleted user's Drive files kept 20 days	restore the user within 20 days

Read against the list's plain three years, the table splits. PayPal and Xero clear it with room, and Stripe's ten-year figure does too, where it applies. Six others have a window shorter than three years somewhere in their documentation: QuickBooks Online's audit log at two years, Shopify at two, Square's search at one, Slack's free plan at one, Zoho at 120 days of silence, Google Workspace at 20. Wave and FreshBooks, whose windows are shorter still, I have put in their own section, because their pages do something more interesting than name a number.

Two of the shortest windows are about something other than the ledger itself.

QuickBooks Online's audit log records "not only financial transactions but all account activities", including who changed what, and its page says two things in a row:

"Events recorded in the audit log are available for two years."

"Note: For audit and security reasons, you can't turn off the audit log."

Intuit, Use the audit log in QuickBooks Online, updated 4 August 2026

The log cannot be switched off and does not outlast two years, which is shorter than any line on the seven-item list. The transactions stay; the record of who touched them does not.

And Google Workspace, on what happens when an administrator deletes a user to free up a licence:

"Drive files the user owns—These files are saved for 20 days but are only accessible if you restore the user."

Google, Delete or remove a user from your organization

The bookkeeper leaves. The account is removed in the same week to stop paying for it. Every supplier invoice saved to that person's own Drive is on a twenty-day fuse. The page does offer an alternative, in one line: suspend or archive the user instead of deleting them.

Which of your records live inside a subscription, and which inside a person's account? For most businesses that is an unknown quantity, and drawing it up is one of the things a process audit does in writing.

The limit is a condition, not a date

The second thing the pages teach: more often than a number of years, the binding constraint is something you have to keep doing.

Zoho Books, in a warning box on the page about cancelling:

"If your Zoho Books account remains inactive for more than 120 days, the data in your account will be permanently deleted in accordance with our Inactive user accounts policy. Ensure that you access your account at least once every 120 days to keep your data intact."

Zoho, What happens to the data in my Zoho Books organization if I cancel my subscription?

The books survive cancellation; four months of nobody logging in deletes them.

QuickBooks Online gives you a year of read-only access after cancelling, and then draws a line:

"If you resubscribe within 12 months of cancelling a paid QuickBooks Online subscription, you will be able to access your earlier data."

"If you resubscribe after 12 months, you can use the same credentials, but your previous data will no longer be available."

Intuit, What happens to my QuickBooks Online data after I cancel?

Xero's condition is reactivating. Shopify's is reactivating too, and its page on deactivating a store adds a liability that outlives the plan: "Even after deactivating your Shopify store, chargebacks can be filed against previous transactions. You'll need to reactivate your store to contest these."

Put those conditions next to the kind of business most likely to be asked for old records. It has stopped trading, or changed hands, or moved tools. It has stopped paying, and it has stopped logging in. Every condition in this section is a condition that business has already failed.

Two pages that disagree with themselves

Two of the eleven help pages contradict themselves within a single scroll, and they are the strongest material here because both halves are on the record.

QuickBooks Online's cancellation page, in prose:

"If you cancel during a free trial or if your trial expires, your data is available for 90 days."

The same page, in a table headed "Data retention policy", has a row for "Cancelled trial / Expired trial". Its duration column reads "1 year from the date of cancellation." Ninety days and one year, for the same event, on the same page. Both were there on 8 September 2026. For a paid subscription the prose and the table agree on one year, so that is the figure in my table above. The trial case I am leaving exactly as I found it, disputed with itself.

FreshBooks does something similar, and its two sentences are more directly opposed. Near the top of its page on downgrading or cancelling:

"If you no longer need to use FreshBooks, you can also cancel your account, which will remain active and accessible until the end of your billing cycle. After this, your data will remain intact and preserved. You can also reactivate your account at any time in the future to access your data."

Further down the same page, under the heading "Cancel an Account":

"Accounts that are inactive for 30 days or more may be deactivated and deleted, inactive accounts will be notified by email prior to deactivation"

FreshBooks, How do I downgrade or cancel my account?

"At any time in the future" and "30 days or more" describe the same account. The reassuring sentence is the one people read, because it is the one near the top, and it is the one the second sentence overrides.

I am not suggesting either vendor is being sly. Help pages are written by different people at different times, and nobody rereads the top when they edit the bottom. But you are the one who has to know which sentence is currently true, and there is no way to find out except by testing it.

Why one vendor deletes on purpose

Storage cost is the obvious explanation. Wave, which deletes an account's data the moment you ask it to, gives another one on its own help page:

"If you have completed the deletion process, your account cannot be restored. To remain compliant with legal requirements to protect your information, Wave cannot keep data once your account is deleted."

"There is one exception if you used Wave's online payments feature. Wave is required to retain that payment history for a certain period of time. Contact our support team for help accessing your payment history."

Wave, getting a deleted account back

Two laws pulling in opposite directions inside one help article. Privacy rules are the reason the books cannot be kept; payments rules are the reason the payment history must be. The business sits between the two, and neither sentence mentions the tax authority, because the tax authority's requirement is on the business rather than on Wave. Wave's page on deleting an account says the same thing from the other side: "Be sure you have extracted all the information you require before closing your account."

Every vendor here holds the same position whether or not it states it: the seven-line list is satisfied by the copy you hold, and by no other.

Where the records actually live

Everything above is about a single system. In most small businesses the records behind a return are spread across several, each with its own window, and that is what makes this an automation question.

The invoice arrived as a PDF. It sits in an inbox, or it was saved to somebody's Drive, or an extraction tool read it and pushed the numbers into the books. In the last case the numbers are in the accounting system and the document is wherever the tool left it, and those two places have different retention. Getting invoice data out of PDFs covers the extraction. The extraction and the original are two records, in two places, with two retention windows.

The approval happened in chat. "Yes, go ahead and pay it" lives in Slack, and on the free plan the usage-limits page is unambiguous: "You can view and search messages and files from the last 90 days." Further down: "Messages and files more than one year old will be permanently deleted." A record of who authorised a payment, gone in a year, from a system nobody thinks of as a records system.

The automation between systems has its own history. When a workflow moved a sale from a store into the books, the record of that move lives on the automation platform, and those windows are measured in weeks rather than years. That is a separate problem with its own numbers, covered in how long your automation keeps its history. Here the books say a transaction exists and the platform no longer says how it got there.

Somebody's account is the container. The Google Workspace case above is one version. The general one is that a surprising amount of a small company's paperwork lives in the account of whoever handled it, and the account is what gets switched off when they leave. Whose accounts your automation runs on is the same fault line seen from the automation side.

Seven years is seven downloads. PayPal will give you seven years of history, and its developer page on activity downloads states the terms: "You can generate reports for any time period within the last 7 years, with a maximum range of 12 months in each report". CSV files are "limited to 50,000 records". Seven years is seven separate downloads at minimum, more if you are busy. That is fine as a scheduled task and hopeless as something remembered on the afternoon you cancel.

What ties these together is that the vendor pages all end the same way: export before you leave. Every one of them, in some phrasing, puts the copy on you. The businesses that can act on that already know where the records are. That is the argument for keeping a register of what is automated, with a column in it for where each system's records go when the system goes.

Where this leaves you

Three questions, none of them legal.

Which of your systems holds a record you could be asked for, and how far back does it reach today? For most of the vendors above the answer is on a help page, and for two of them it is on the page twice, disagreeing.

Which of those windows is a date, and which is a condition? A window that closes after 120 days without a login, or 30 days of inactivity, or the moment a user is deleted, is a window that closes on the quietest businesses first.

Where is the copy that is yours? If the answer is "in the system", it is the system's copy, on the system's terms, and Xero has told you in plain words what those terms are.

A list answers all three, and it has to exist before the request arrives rather than after. Writing it is clerical work.

If you would rather have that list written than reconstruct it from eleven help centres in a hurry: mapping which systems hold your records, how long each keeps them and where the copies go is part of the process audit. $299, three business days, and a written map you keep whether or not you hire us.

Nothing here is legal or tax advice, and the retention periods quoted are United States federal income-tax periods, given as a worked example of the shape of the problem rather than as the rule that applies to you.

Related: when a new account breaks your bookkeeping automation is about a different kind of record the books do not keep: the change to the chart of accounts itself.