What does a corporation have to keep, and what makes a receipt good enough?

How long a record has to live

The period is six years from the end of the last tax year the records relate to — not six years from the date printed on the receipt. A document that supports a balance still moving in a later year is held against that later year, so the clock is easiest to run from a year end rather than from a document, and it is usually longer than people assume.

Some records are never released. Anything bearing on the long-term acquisition and disposal of property, the share registry, or other historical information affecting the sale, liquidation or wind-up of the business is kept indefinitely. A corporation that is dissolved keeps its records for two years after the date of dissolution.

Records are kept at the place of business or the residence in Canada unless CRA gives written permission to keep them elsewhere, and destroying them early needs written permission as well — Form T137, Request for Destruction of Records. There is no informal version of that permission, and destroying records without it carries a prosecution risk rather than a penalty.

What makes a receipt good enough to carry a credit

A receipt does two jobs with two different tests. For the income-tax deduction it has to show an expense incurred to earn business income, which is why the business purpose recorded beside it matters as much as the amount. For the GST/HST input tax credit it has to satisfy the Input Tax Credit Information Regulations, and those grow stricter as the purchase gets larger.

Below the first threshold the supplier's name, the date and the total amount are enough. At the first threshold the supplier's GST/HST registration number and the tax — or a statement that the total includes it — have to appear too. At the second, the buyer's name, a description of what was supplied and the terms of payment are added.

The two thresholds are $100 and $500. Section 3 of the Input Tax Credit Information (GST/HST) Regulations sets the requirement by whether the total shown on the supporting documentation is less than $100, is $100 or more and less than $500, or is $500 or more. They replaced $30 and $150: the increase was enacted by the Fall Economic Statement Implementation Act, 2023 — S.C. 2024, c. 15, s. 142, royal assent 20 June 2024 — whose subsection 142(4) deems it to have come into force on 20 April 2021, so it reaches receipts from that date on.

That history is worth knowing because it is still being described wrongly. CRA's own input tax credit page carries a sentence saying the increase is "under proposed changes", years after the amendment received royal assent, and second-hand articles repeat it. The consolidated regulation linked below is the text in force, and it is what LedgerLodge prompts against: the supplier registration number is asked for once a purchase reaches $100.

The registration number is the defect no later diligence can cure. A missing business purpose can be written down from memory and a supplier name can be looked up, but a number that was never printed on the bill can only come from the supplier — and if the supplier has closed, the credit is simply lost. There is also a window on the claim itself: most registrants have four years after the end of the reporting period in which the credit first became available.

Paper, scans, and what electronic actually means

An electronic record has to be kept in an electronically readable format, which CRA defines as information supported by a system capable of producing an accessible and useable copy. The test is whether the record can be produced and used, not whether something can be printed: a summary PDF whose underlying data is gone does not meet it.

Paper may be thrown away, on a condition. Source documents imaged in accordance with the latest national standard of Canada — CAN/CGSB-72.11-93, Microfilm and Electronic Images as Documentary Evidence — may be disposed of and their images kept as permanent records. The standard is about the imaging process, how the image is produced, controlled and maintained; it is not a resolution setting on one photograph.

Where the record lives counts as well. Records kept outside Canada and accessed electronically from Canada are not considered records in Canada. Where they are maintained electronically abroad, CRA may accept a copy, provided it is made available in Canada in an electronically readable and useable format.

What LedgerLodge does about each of these

Every expense carries an evidence state computed on the server, with the missing thing named rather than a score: no receipt attached, no supplier, no business purpose, or no supplier registration number on a purchase large enough to need one. The state is not cosmetic — an expense that is not evidence-ready has its input tax credit held out of the filing-ready totals until the gap is closed, so the figure that reaches a return is the one the documents actually support.

A receipt is stored against the expense it belongs to, or against the capital asset a purchase invoice is evidence for, and the database enforces that it hangs off exactly one of them. Exports carry it through: CSV and XLSX state a receipt count per row, and the self-contained audit and CPA ZIP packages carry the source files themselves with relative paths to them. Everything exports at any time, in open formats.

Two things it does not do. It does not judge whether your scanning process meets CAN/CGSB-72.11-93 — that is a fact about how you image documents rather than about the file you upload, and it is the condition on throwing the paper away. And it does not decide the retention clock for you: six years runs from a tax year end, and which year a document relates to is occasionally a judgement rather than a date.