Definition
You are moving house. At the back of a cupboard sits a folder: the invoices from your first two years, faded till receipts, statements from an account you closed long ago.
Nobody has ever asked you for any of it, the business is running, and throwing the lot away feels perfectly reasonable. That is exactly the moment it becomes expensive.
Keeping your records is not about tidying: it is about remaining able to produce a document on the day an administration asks for it.
A micro-enterprise files no balance sheet and no profit statement, and that absence of bookkeeping is read as an absence of archives.
The scheme lightens how you keep accounts, it takes nothing away from what you must be able to prove.
The second thing to know is the surprising one: there is no single retention period.
One box mixes documents governed by the code de commerce (French commercial code), others by tax law, others again by the evidence rules between a business and its customer, each with its own duration.
The rule that never misleads fits in one sentence: throw nothing away while an administration can still raise a question about the year concerned, and check the period attached to each document on the official business portal before emptying the folder.
What you must be able to produce
An audit never asks for "your accounts". It asks for specific documents, and it cross-checks them against one another.
| Document | What it proves, and to whom |
|---|---|
| The Income ledger (livre des recettes) | That the turnover declared to URSSAF matches what actually came in |
| The Purchase ledger (registre des achats) | For sales of goods and accommodation, that what was bought reappears as revenue |
| Invoices issued | What was sold, to whom, on what date, and under which VAT regime |
| Purchase invoices and receipts | Where the money going out came from, and that the activity is real |
| Bank statements | The link between the paperwork and the actual movements |
| Declarations and tax notices | What you declared, and what was claimed from you in return |
| Signed quotes and contracts | What was ordered and at what price, if a customer disputes it |
An Invoice is therefore not kept for the administration alone: it is also the only document you can hold up to a customer who challenges a job long after paying for it.
The circle of those who can ask you for a document is in fact wider than the administration.
An online seller keeps the invoices from their eco-organisation, which prove they joined the Packaging EPR scheme.
They serve for the day the marketplace asks them to back up their identifier before pulling their listings.
As for the two ledgers, the duty to keep them is written into article L123-28 of the code de commerce, the very article that separates sales of goods and accommodation from service providers.
The income ledger is not a supporting document, it is an index: every line points to a piece of paper and is worth nothing without it.
Keeping the ledger while binning the invoices is keeping the table of contents of a book that no longer exists. The opposite reflex costs just as much: invoices without bank statements prove nothing, because it is matching the two that carries conviction.
With no document, €10,000 becomes turnover
Marc is a freelance developer in the non-regulated liberal category (BNC, non-commercial profits). In 2026 he collects €40,000 and declares every euro of it.
An audit picks up €10,000 of transfers on his account with no matching invoice, no ledger line and no contract. It was a family loan, but nothing was ever put in writing.
In practice, it is not for the administration to prove that these €10,000 are turnover: it is for him to prove that they are not. With no document, the amount is added back.
Social contributions are then calculated at the overall rate of 25.6% applicable in 2026 to liberal professions under the general scheme, outside the Cipav, so €2,560.
On the tax side, the Standard allowance of 34% in 2026 removes €3,400 and leaves €6,600 added to his taxable income.
That 25.6% rate covers neither the vocational training contribution (CFP) nor income tax: both are paid on top.
A loan statement and a two-line letter would have been enough.
Your archives are not there only to justify what you declared, they are there above all to rule out what you never had to declare. The ceiling rule points the same way.
The micro scheme only ends in 2026 if the threshold, €83,600 for services and liberal activities, was exceeded in both 2024 and 2025.
Two years whose detail you must still be able to lay out long after closing them.
Two confusions that empty a folder too early
The first is about dates.
Both the ceiling and the contributions are calculated on turnover excluding VAT actually collected during the calendar year, never on the amount invoiced: an invoice sent in December and paid in January counts towards the following year.
The document and the bank movement therefore fall in different years, and the Cash receipt that counts may sit in one folder while the invoice sleeps in another.
Throwing away either one breaks the match.
The second is about format. Paper is not required and digital is accepted, but the condition is not the format: it is the evidential guarantee.
A ledger kept on a computer must be identified and dated at the moment each entry is made, by means offering full guarantees; a folder of files that anyone can rewrite three years later does not meet that condition.
Finally, for as long as the exemption applies, the wording "TVA non applicable, article 293 B du CGI" (VAT not applicable, article 293 B of the French tax code) remains the one to put on your invoices until 31 December 2026.
Contrary to what is endlessly repeated, it is not the only accepted wording: the Bulletin officiel des finances publiques (the official tax doctrine) accepts three, including the reference to article 293 B bis for the EU-wide exemption.
On 1 January 2027, VAT rules move into a new code and the wording becomes "TVA non applicable, article L. 233-3 du CIBS". An invoice that still carries the old one remains accepted until 30 June 2028.
This page is up to date as of 5 September 2026 and will be revised at that deadline.
Frequently asked questions
How long must invoices be kept?
Longer than the job they relate to, and not for the same length of time across the board: the period depends on which body of law the document belongs to, commercial, tax or civil, and those periods are not aligned with one another.
Check document by document on the official portal before throwing anything away, then align a whole year's folder on the longest period it contains.
It is the only method that never bins a document a year too early.
Is a scan enough, or must the paper be kept?
A digital copy is accepted as long as it is faithful, legible, and cannot be altered without the alteration being visible.
The point to watch is not the scanner but the archiving: a file sitting in a shared folder that several people can rewrite loses the evidential guarantee that makes it worth anything on the day of an audit.
I have closed my micro-enterprise, can I throw everything away?
No. Deregistration stops the activity and the contributions, it erases neither the past years nor the administration's right to examine them.
The records of your final trading years are kept after closure exactly as if the business were still running, and that is precisely the period when you are most defenceless if the box has gone.
I have never kept an income ledger, what should I do?
Rebuild it from your bank statements and invoices, dating it honestly on the day you actually write it, then keep it up as you go from now on.
What must never be done is to backdate it: a ledger tidied up after the fact amounts to forgery, which is a criminal offence, and it turns a simple administrative failing into something far more serious.