How long does a Malaysian business have to keep its records?
Seven years is the number that comes up again and again — in tax law, company law and SST. Here is what it covers, and what "keeping" a record actually means.
Ask an accountant in Malaysia how long to keep your books and you will almost always hear the same answer: seven years. That number is not a rule of thumb. It appears, independently, in several of the laws a business operates under.
Where the seven years comes from
- Income Tax Act 1967 — records that support your tax return must be kept for seven years from the end of the year the income relates to.
- Companies Act 2016 — a company must keep its accounting records for seven years after the transactions they cover are completed.
- Sales Tax Act 2018 and Service Tax Act 2018 — registered businesses must keep their SST records for seven years.
Because the periods overlap, the practical rule is simple: treat every financial record as something you will need for at least seven years after the year it belongs to.
What counts as a record
More than most people expect. The obvious items are sales and purchase invoices, receipts and bank statements. But the trail that explains them matters just as much:
- Payment vouchers and official receipts
- Payroll records — salaries, EPF, SOCSO and EIS contributions
- Contracts, quotations and delivery orders that support a transaction
- Journal entries, and the reason each adjustment was made
- e-Invoices and their validation details from MyInvois
Keeping is not the same as having
A shoebox of faded thermal receipts technically "keeps" a record, but it will not survive seven years, and it cannot answer an auditor's question quickly. What an auditor or an LHDN officer wants is to pick any number in your accounts and follow it back to the document behind it.
That is the standard worth aiming for: every entry traceable to its source, every source document legible, and nothing deleted because it looked old.
How Fortura handles it
In Fortura every journal entry is linked to the document that created it — the invoice, the receipt, the bank line. Uploaded documents are stored alongside the entry, and financial and audit records are archived rather than deleted, so the trail is still there when someone asks for it years later.
This article is general information, not legal or tax advice. Rules change — check the current position with LHDN or your accountant before acting on it.