Documents in the UAE: what, how, and how long to keep them so you can sleep soundly

One of the most common questions from clients on UAE accounting and taxation is which documents must be kept and for how long. This isn't a bureaucratic formality but a strict legal requirement, and not knowing it can lead to serious fines. Let's break down every obligation piece by piece.

Which documents must be kept

A company in the UAE must systematically maintain and keep a full set of documents confirming its business activity and the accuracy of its tax calculations — and this covers not just tax reporting itself, but the source documents that reporting is built from.

• Accounting records and registers — the general ledger, transaction journals, balance sheets, and profit and loss statements.
• Supporting documents — every tax invoice (issued and received), credit notes, contracts, invoices, and completion certificates.
• Tax reporting — filed VAT returns and their supporting calculations.
• Supply chain documents — detailed records of every transaction involving goods and services, naming the counterparties, including confirmation of the emirate where the supply took place.

Retention periods: the main rule and the exceptions

The standard periods set by law: 5 years for taxpayers — the count starts from the end of the relevant tax period; 5 years for everyone else (for example, tax agents) — from the end of the calendar year the document was created; 15 years for documents related to real estate, given the long-term nature of such assets.

But the "standard" is a relative concept: the Federal Tax Authority (FTA) provides for situations that automatically extend the retention period. So 5 years becomes 7 or 9 if: there's a tax dispute with the FTA — plus 4 years on top of the standard period; an audit is planned or underway — plus 4 years; a voluntary disclosure is filed in the fifth year after the period — plus 1 year; a tax agent's authority has ended — they're required to keep the documents for another year from that date. In practice, that means an archive may need to be kept for 7, and in some cases as many as 9, years.

Practical recommendations

It's worth digitizing and organizing your document flow: keeping boxes of paper is a risky, inconvenient method, whereas an electronic document management system with reliable cloud storage keeps files intact and accessible. It's useful to develop a clear archiving policy — an internal set of rules defining what's kept, where, and for how long.

It's important not to split documents into "important" and "less important": for a tax audit, a receipt for office coffee matters just as much as a contract for a major supply — everything needs to be kept. And keep the specifics in mind separately: special requirements for e-commerce and the extended retention period for real estate documents.