Every entrepreneur knows the headline number: your administration has to be kept for seven years. That is the fiscal retention obligation, and it applies whether you are a freelancer with a dozen invoices a year or a wholesaler with a warehouse.
What is less widely known is exactly what has to be kept — and that is where packing notes trip people up.
What counts as basic data
The Dutch tax authorities treat the following as the basic data of a business administration:
- Purchase and sales administration
- Stock records
- The ledger
- Payroll administration
- Debtor and creditor administration
All of it has to be kept for seven years. After that period it will not be asked for.
There is one common exception: because of the revision period on the pre-tax deduction for real estate — business premises and the like — those records have to be kept for ten years.
Retention periods are set nationally, so if you trade from outside the Netherlands, check the number that applies where you are registered. The principle is the same everywhere; only the count of years moves.
So what about packing notes?
Here is the assumption worth correcting. Plenty of businesses throw the packing note away on the grounds that the order is already on the invoice, so the note is a disposable label.
The opposite is true. Packing notes fall under the basic data and form part of the supporting record of the business administration.
The reason becomes obvious once you look at what the two documents actually say. A packing note describes the contents of a shipment — the products, the quantities, and who sent them. The invoice describes what is owed for it. Together they are the complete record of the sale: what left your premises, and what was billed for it.
If a delivery is later disputed — a short shipment, goods that never arrived, an item returned — the invoice on its own does not settle it. The packing note does.
Which is an argument for keeping it digitally
Seven years of paper delivery notes is a filing cabinet nobody wants and a document nobody can find when it is actually needed.
Keeping the administration online solves both problems at once. In Invoice Office every document you create — invoice, quote, packing note, credit note, purchase — stays in the administration and stays searchable, so retrieving a three-year-old delivery note is a search rather than an afternoon.
It also means the packing note sits next to the invoice it belongs with, which is exactly how you will want to find it.
The practical version
- Keep packing notes. They are basic data, not packaging.
- Keep them for the same seven years as the rest of the administration.
- Keep them somewhere you can actually search, because the whole point of the obligation is being able to produce the document later.
If you are creating delivery notes by hand at the moment, this is the cheapest possible reason to stop: create a packing slip online and the retention question answers itself.
Related reading: what is a packing note, create and send a delivery note, and the packing note software behind it.