Under Polish law, accounting records must be kept for five years and employment files for up to fifty. A square metre of office space in Szczecin costs many times more than a square metre of storage.
Records cannot be thrown away when the financial year closes, and how long employment files must be kept depends on when the person was hired. A unit at LOCKIT is an archive outside the office that you can reach at any hour: with no courier to book and no service request to file with an archiving company.
| TYPE OF RECORD | RETENTION PERIOD |
|---|---|
| Accounting books and invoicesAccounting books, invoices, accounting evidence | 5 years from the end of the financial year |
| Tax returns and VATTax returns and VAT documentation | 5 years from the end of the year in which the payment was due |
| Employment records — from 2019Employment records — hired from 1 Jan 2019 | 10 years |
| Employment records — 1999–2018Employment records — hired from 1 Jan 1999 to 31 Dec 2018 | 50 years, or 10 years after submitting the ZUS OSW statement and ZUS RIA report |
| Employment records — before 1999Employment records — hired before 1 Jan 1999 | 50 years |
| ZUS documentationSocial insurance (ZUS) documentation | 5 years for documents submitted after 1 Jan 2012; 10 years for earlier documents |
| Construction documentationDesign and as-built construction documentation | for the lifetime of the building |
This is general information, not legal advice. Confirm the deadlines that apply to your company with your accountant.
Unit S (3 m²) holds several hundred ring binders or a few dozen archive boxes stacked in columns: the archive of a typical small company over several years. Larger collections, especially once technical and design documentation is included, call for unit M (6 m²). You can change size during the rental, so the archive grows with the company.
Renting online takes five minutes, a VAT invoice is issued monthly, and your documents are reachable 24 hours a day.
