How long must you keep business records in Switzerland?

If you run a company in Switzerland, your invoices from 2020 are probably sitting in a cloud folder, neatly sorted by year. Ask yourself one question: could you prove today that not a single one of them has been altered since?

If the answer is no, your archive very likely fails the Swiss requirements. And the reason has nothing to do with the cloud, which is what most founders assume. It is both narrower and more awkward than that.

Founders arriving from abroad usually carry an assumption with them. Six years in the United Kingdom, seven in much of the United States. Switzerland is longer, and the rule that catches people out is not the duration at all. It is the form.

Ten years, running from the end of the financial year

Article 958f of the Swiss Code of Obligations is short and leaves little room for interpretation:

The detail that matters is in the second sentence. The clock starts at the close of the financial year, not on the date of the document. An invoice from January 2026, sitting in a financial year that closes on 31 December 2026, must be kept until 31 December 2036. That is closer to eleven years than ten.

Who is caught by this? Under art. 957 CO, all legal entities (Sàrl, SA, associations entered in the commercial register), plus sole proprietorships and partnerships that generated more than CHF 500 000 in revenue in the last financial year. Below that threshold the bookkeeping obligation is lighter, limited to income, expenditure and assets, but the retention obligation still applies.

Some documents run longer:

Paper is not compulsory

Many founders keep ring binders as a precaution, convinced the paper original is the only thing that will hold up. Swiss law does not say that.

Article 958f para. 3 CO allows retention "on paper, by electronic means or in a comparable manner", subject to two conditions: the link to the underlying transactions must be guaranteed, and the records must remain legible in all circumstances.

Scanning supplier invoices and then destroying the paper originals is therefore permitted. The Federal Tax Administration confirms this explicitly in its VAT Info 16, with a worked example: a company scans invoices on receipt, checks their accuracy in a documented process, links them to the corresponding accounting entries, and destroys the paper.

That same guidance attaches a condition almost nobody reads to the end. Records kept only in electronic form carry the same evidential weight as paper "provided that all the requirements of the Olico are met". Everything turns on that clause.

Modifiable or non-modifiable: the distinction that decides everything

The Olico, the Ordinance on the Keeping and Preservation of Business Records (SR 221.431), splits storage media into two categories in article 9. The regimes are not the same.

The definition of a modifiable medium, in art. 9 para. 2, is worth reading word for word: media are deemed modifiable where they "can be changed or deleted without the operation being detectable on the data carrier itself". The ordinance names hard disks and solid-state drives explicitly.

That is precisely what a cloud drive, a NAS or any file server runs on. Your archive therefore sits on modifiable media within the meaning of the ordinance. This is not disqualifying in itself. Art. 9 para. 1 let. b permits it, subject to four cumulative conditions:

1. Technical processes guarantee the integrity of the stored information (the ordinance cites electronic signatures as an example).
2. The moment of storage can be proven without any possibility of falsification, for instance through a timestamping system.
3. Any other rules applicable to the process used are complied with.
4. The procedures and methods of use are documented, and the necessary records (protocols, connection log files) are themselves retained.

Why a shared drive folder is not enough

Run those four conditions against an ordinary shared folder, the setup most small Swiss companies actually have.

Integrity. A PDF can be replaced by another with the same name. Version history exists with most providers, but it is a convenience of the service rather than evidence you can rely on: its depth is limited in time, and it disappears with the file once someone holds sufficient rights. An administrator can always make the operation vanish.

Timestamping. The modification date you see is metadata attached to the file. It travels with the file, it does not seal it. That is not tamper-proof timestamping within the meaning of condition 2.

Documented procedures. Art. 4 Olico requires written working instructions describing the organisation, responsibilities and infrastructure used, retained as long as the books they helped produce. In practice this document almost never exists.

A shared folder therefore fails three of the four conditions. And art. 3 Olico, which sets the integrity requirement, is drafted to leave no margin: the method of retention must ensure that records "cannot be modified without the modification being apparent".

So the problem is not the cloud. It is the absence of a layer of proof on top of the storage. The distinction matters, because it also points to the fix: repatriating files onto a disk in the office would solve nothing. What is missing is something storage alone does not provide.

The question to put to your current accountant fits in one sentence: how do you prove that my 2020 records have not been modified since? If the answer mentions passwords, backups or a secure server, it is answering a different question. Confidentiality and availability are not integrity.

Three requirements nobody plans for

Beyond integrity, the Olico imposes three obligations that are rarely addressed.

Availability, art. 6. Until the end of the retention period, any authorised person must be able to consult and verify the books at any time and within a reasonable period. Paragraph 3 goes further: on request, it must be possible to render the books legible without auxiliary tools.

Access logging, art. 8. Information must be systematically inventoried and protected against unauthorised access. More to the point, "consultations and accesses are recorded", and those records are subject to the same retention obligation as the data itself. The access log has to be kept for ten years too.

Checking and migration, art. 10. The integrity and legibility of the media must be checked regularly. Changing format or medium is permitted, provided the information remains complete and accurate and legibility continues to satisfy legal requirements. Every transfer must be minuted, and the minutes retained with the information.

This last point connects to a requirement in art. 958f para. 3 CO that practice tends to overlook: the records must remain legible in all circumstances. An export in the proprietary format of an accounting package ticks the box today. It will not necessarily tick it in 2036, if the vendor has disappeared or changed format. PDF/A and open formats exist for this reason.

The annual report exception

Art. 958f para. 2 CO stands apart from the rest: "A printed and signed copy of the annual report and the audit report must be retained."

The letter of the provision calls for a signed paper copy. Recent doctrine nevertheless accepts the electronic equivalent, provided it carries a qualified electronic signature: under art. 14 para. 2bis CO, a qualified electronic signature with a qualified electronic timestamp is deemed equivalent to a handwritten signature.

In practice the sensible advice is to print and sign one copy per financial year. It costs one printout a year and removes the argument entirely.

What actually happens if you cannot produce

There is no need to dramatise this, and the reality is less spectacular than a criminal sanction. The cost is evidential, and it lands at the worst possible moment: during an audit.

In proceedings, the governing principle is the free assessment of evidence (art. 81 para. 3 LTVA). VAT Info 16 draws the direct consequence: the taxable person "bears the consequences of the absence of evidence for items capable of cancelling or reducing the tax due". In plain terms, you have to prove the charges that reduce your tax. The administration does not have to prove they never existed.

Where the accounting records are missing or incomplete, art. 79 LTVA allows the Federal Tax Administration to assess the tax at its own discretion.

And one final point, the most underestimated, set out in VAT Info 16: "the risks connected with the destruction of the original information carrier are borne by the company subject to the retention obligation". If you scanned and then destroyed your paper originals, and your electronic archive does not meet the Olico conditions, you no longer have either.

Five questions to place your company

1. Can you demonstrate that a record archived three years ago is identical to the one stored at the time?
2. Is there a timestamp of storage that nobody can alter after the fact, including an administrator?
3. Are your archiving procedures written down anywhere, and retained as long as the records themselves?
4. Are accesses to your archive logged, and are those logs retained?
5. Will your files be readable in ten years using ordinary tools?

A negative answer does not mean you are in breach tomorrow morning. It means that if an audit comes, the burden of proof works against you.

How Klear handles this

Retention here rests on two distinct layers, because they answer two different needs.

The working copy stays where you work: your accounting software and your document space, consultable and editable day to day. That is what you need within the year.

On top of it sits an immutable archive layer, and that is the one answering the retention obligation. Each snapshot is encrypted (AES-256-GCM), fingerprinted with SHA-256, then written to object storage under a ten year retention lock in compliance mode. That mode has one characteristic that makes all the difference: neither the client, nor we, nor an administrator can modify or delete an object before its term. An archive we could erase would not prove very much.

Alongside it, an archiving certificate is produced for each financial year, setting out the scope archived, the number of records, the SHA-256 fingerprint of the set and the date until which retention is locked. That is the document to produce in an audit, and it ties back to art. 958f CO.

On location, worth being precise since the question comes up often: this immutable archive layer is hosted in the European Union. Neither art. 958f CO nor the Olico imposes any condition as to place. The criteria set by the ordinance are integrity, availability and legibility, not geography. A Swiss archive meeting none of the four conditions in art. 9 para. 1 let. b would be non-compliant, and a European archive meeting all of them is compliant.

Where to go next

The choice of accounting software drives part of this, particularly the long term legibility of exports. The retention question also sits at the heart of closing your books, when the records for the year are finalised.

If you want to know where your company stands, the simplest route is to tell us how your records are archived today. We will tell you plainly what holds and what does not, including if the answer is that your current setup is fine. Our bookkeeping service covers this as standard, and you can get in touch if you would rather discuss it first.

This article sets out general information on Swiss retention requirements for business records under the Code of Obligations and the Olico. It is not individual tax or legal advice and does not take account of your particular circumstances. Retention and evidential questions are assessed case by case by the competent authority. Please seek advice tailored to your situation.

Further reading: accounting software · year-end accounts · digital vs. traditional fiduciary