With the fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act of 29 October 2024, the retention period for accounting documents (§ 257 Abs. 4 HGB für Buchungsbelege; § 257 Abs. 1 Nr. 4 HGB) was shortened from ten to eight years with effect from 1 January 2025. This reduction only applies to accounting documents. In particular, the ten-year retention obligation continues to apply to annual financial statements, balance sheets, inventories, etc. (see § 257 Abs. 1 Nr. 1 HGB).
The shortened statutory retention period results in a shorter storage period for accounting documents from a data protection perspective. Once the new statutory retention period of eight years for accounting documents has expired, they can therefore no longer be stored based on the legal basis for the fulfilment of a legal obligation.
In IKAROS, the retention periods are defined by the deletion concepts on transaction templates. We will deliver the adaptation of the standard deletion concept for accounting documents with the following versions and patches:
- IKAROS G4 Version 2025.1
- IKAROS G4 Patch 2024.1 P1
- IKAROS G4 Patch 2023.1 P4