Digital Receipt Retention in Germany: GoBD for Freelancers

The shoebox has had its day

As a freelancer in Germany, hundreds of receipts pile up each year: restaurant slips, software invoices, train tickets, till receipts for office supplies. Many people stuff it all into a shoebox or binder, afraid the tax office (Finanzamt) might one day want to see the paper. Do you really need to? No. The GoBD rules explicitly let you keep receipts entirely digitally and throw the paper away afterwards. You just need to know a handful of rules.

In short: You may store receipts digitally and destroy the paper originals if the digital copy is complete, visually identical, and tamper-proof and you keep a short Verfahrensdokumentation (documented procedures) — this is called substitute scanning. Booking documents must be kept for 8 years since 2025 (down from 10), your records for 10 years. The legal basis is Section 147 of the Abgabenordnung (Fiscal Code).

What are the GoBD?

GoBD stands for the “Principles for the Proper Keeping and Storage of Books, Records, and Documents in Electronic Form, and for Data Access” (Grundsätze zur ordnungsmäßigen Führung und Aufbewahrung von Büchern, Aufzeichnungen und Unterlagen in elektronischer Form sowie zum Datenzugriff). It sounds bureaucratic, but the idea is simple: if you keep or store tax-relevant documents digitally, they must be complete, correct, ordered, timely, and tamper-proof.

The GoBD are a directive from the Federal Ministry of Finance (Bundesfinanzministerium), not a separate law. They describe how the tax authorities interpret the rules in the Fiscal Code (Sections 145–147 AO) and the VAT Act (Section 14b UStG) for the digital world. For a freelancer using the EÜR (Einnahmenüberschussrechnung, the simple income-surplus calculation), this means: as soon as you handle invoices and receipts digitally — which you effectively always do the moment a PDF arrives — the GoBD apply.

The good news: a shoebox full of paper is not required. Digital is completely sufficient and, in a tax audit, actually easier to hand over.

Digital receipt retention: how long you must keep them

Retention periods are set by Section 147 (3) AO. Three periods matter for freelancers:

Document	Period	Examples
Records & annual statements	10 years	your EÜR, asset register, inventory
Booking documents	8 years (since 2025)	incoming and outgoing invoices, receipts, till slips, bank statements
Commercial & business letters	6 years	contracts, quotes, order confirmations, business emails

The 8-year rule since 2025

Until the end of 2024, booking documents had to be kept for 10 years. The Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act (Viertes Bürokratieentlastungsgesetz, BEG IV) shortened this to 8 years as of 1 January 2025 — in parallel across Section 147 AO, Section 257 of the Commercial Code (HGB), and Section 14b UStG. The shorter period applies to all booking documents whose 10-year period had not yet expired on 1 January 2025. Your records and the EÜR itself still stay at 10 years.

When does the clock start?

The period does not start on the receipt’s date but at the end of the calendar year in which the document was created (Section 147 (4) AO).

Example: An incoming invoice from March 2025 is a booking document. The clock starts on 31 December 2025 and runs 8 years. You must keep the invoice until the end of 2033 and may dispose of it from 1 January 2034.

Is a photo of a receipt enough? Substitute scanning

The most common question: can I simply photograph a paper receipt with my phone and throw the original away? Yes — this is called substitute scanning (ersetzendes Scannen) and has been explicitly allowed since the GoBD update, including mobile scanning with a smartphone.

For the photo to replace the paper, three conditions must be met:

1. Complete and visually identical — the digital copy must reproduce the receipt fully in content and look the same as the original. Nothing cropped, everything legible.
2. Stored tamper-proof — the filed receipt must not be changeable unnoticed afterwards (more on this below).
3. Verfahrensdokumentation in place — a short written description of how you scan and file.

Once these are met, you may destroy the paper original. No shoebox, no binder, no moving box in the basement.

What does “tamper-proof” (revisionssicher) mean?

Non-alterability is the heart of the GoBD. A digitally filed receipt must be stored so that it cannot be changed, overwritten, or deleted unnoticed after it was recorded. Every change must be logged traceably.

A single image file sitting loose on your desktop, which you can overwrite or rename anytime, does not meet this on its own. You need storage that guarantees this traceability — for example a document system that keeps every version and a change log. “Tamper-proof” is exactly this state: complete, ordered, unchangeable, and findable at any time.

The Verfahrensdokumentation — short, but required

The Verfahrensdokumentation (documented procedures) describes how receipts move through your business from arrival to storage. It is the precondition for having the destruction of paper originals accepted in a tax audit (Betriebsprüfung).

For a solo freelancer it may be short — one or two pages are enough. It should answer:

• Arrival: how do receipts reach you (post, email, app)?
• Capture: with what and when do you scan or photograph them?
• Storage: where are they saved, how named, how sorted?
• Protection: how do you ensure nothing is changed or deleted unnoticed?
• Destruction: when is the paper original disposed of?

The Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors offers a template you can adapt to your own setup.

Originals you must keep

Not everything can go after scanning. You must keep the original of, among others:

• notarized contracts (e.g. real-estate purchase contracts),
• annual statements and opening balances in signed form,
• customs and import papers where the original is required.

For typical freelancer day-to-day paper — invoices, receipts, till slips, bank statements — there is no obligation to keep the paper original. You may dispose of these after proper scanning.

Practical checklist

• Capture everything digitally: photograph or scan each paper receipt promptly — complete and legible.
• Store tamper-proof: save receipts in storage that logs changes, not as loose files on the desktop.
• Name them sensibly: date, supplier, and amount in the filename or as metadata so you can find each receipt.
• Write a Verfahrensdokumentation: one or two pages, created once and updated on changes.
• Meet the periods: booking documents 8 years, records 10 years, contracts 6 years.
• Keep required originals: notarized contracts, signed statements, customs papers on paper.
• Back it up: a second copy of the digital archive so a disk failure does not wipe eight years of receipts.

For more basics on bookkeeping and deductions, see our page for freelancers. How the receipts turn into your filing at year-end is covered in how to prepare the EÜR, and what actually happens in a tax audit is explained there in detail.

How Restio helps

This is exactly where Restio takes the fear out of the shoebox:

• Scan receipts and store them permanently — photograph each receipt with your phone; Restio captures it, reads out date, amount, and supplier, and files it permanently and in order, so you can safely dispose of the paper.
• Bank statement import — import your account transactions and match each one to the right receipt, so no expense is left without proof.
• EÜR dossier — at year-end you get your income and expenses sorted by the categories of the EÜR form, always traceable back to the individual receipts.
• DATEV CSV export — if you or your tax advisor need the data structured, export it as a DATEV CSV in one tap.

Get Restio — and make the shoebox obsolete for good.

Further reading

• Section 147 AO — retention periods (Gesetze im Internet)
• Federal Ministry of Finance — GoBD