Keeping accounting records for 10 years in Luxembourg: legal value and archiving in Odoo

In Luxembourg, accounting books and records must be kept for 10 years from the close of the financial year they relate to, and the place of retention is Luxembourg. The follow-up question is the interesting one: can I bin the paper once everything is scanned into my ERP? Yes, but not under just any conditions.

This is the subject everyone postpones until the day the tax authority asks for a 2019 document and nobody knows whether it still exists. Here are the rules, what the 2015 electronic archiving law actually allows, and where Odoo sits in all this.

How long must you keep accounting records in Luxembourg?

The reference period is ten years. Article 16 of the Commercial Code requires traders to keep their accounting books and records for ten years from the close of the financial year to which they relate. Guichet.lu also states that the place of retention is Luxembourg.

One consequence few people plan for: a financial year closing on 31 December 2026 has to stay accessible until the end of 2036. That outlives most software, most file formats and, usually, the hosting contract you are about to sign. Being able to get your data back out is not an IT preference, it is a legal obligation in disguise.

Does a scan carry the same weight as the paper original?

Not automatically. This is the point most SMEs miss, and it changes everything about the decision to destroy paper.

The law of 25 July 2015 on electronic archiving created the status of Dematerialisation or Conservation Service Provider (PSDC), granted by ILNAS to organisations certified against a specific technical rule. That is the whole point of the scheme: a digital copy produced and kept within a PSDC process benefits from a presumption of conformity with the original, which lets you part with the paper without weakening your position in a dispute or an audit.

Outside that framework, scanning is not forbidden and a scan remains evidence. But its weight can be challenged by the other side, and a challenge is exactly what happens in litigation or a tax audit. So the question is not "do I scan?" but "which documents justify archiving with full legal weight, and which can stay as working copies?". For many SMEs the sensible answer is: contracts, deeds and high-stakes documents with a PSDC, routine invoicing flows in the ERP with the paper or the original file retained.

What Odoo actually archives

Odoo is not an evidential archiving system, and nobody should sell it as one. It does, however, do very well what an ERP should do: keep the document attached to the entry, and make both findable.

What you get

Every vendor bill carries its original PDF as an attachment, the very file that went through automatic recognition, as we explain in our article on invoice OCR in Odoo. Posted journal entries cannot be deleted: they are reversed by a counter-entry, which leaves a readable audit trail. The Documents module organises everything else (contracts, articles of association, correspondence) with automatic filing rules. And the FAIA export hands the tax authority a full year of accounting data in a standardised format, which is the technical counterpart of the retention obligation.

What you have to add

Three blind spots, best handled at implementation rather than ten years later.

Certifying the copy. Odoo stores a file; it does not certify that the file conforms to an original you destroyed. If your policy involves destroying paper, you need a PSDC process upstream or alongside.

Where it is hosted. Since the expected place of retention is Luxembourg, where your servers run and where your backups sit is not a rhetorical question. It plays out differently on shared hosting, on a European cloud or on Luxembourg infrastructure, and it deserves to be raised with your provider before signature, not during an audit.

Reversibility over ten years. What happens if you leave Odoo in four years? An annual FAIA export, a full database backup and a set of exported PDFs, archived outside the system, cost half a day a year and guarantee you can still answer long after you changed tools. It is the simplest measure on this page, and the most commonly skipped.

Frequently asked questions

Can I destroy paper invoices once they are scanned into Odoo?

Not without care. A plain scan keeps evidential value, but that value can be contested. To destroy paper safely, the dematerialisation has to follow a process compliant with the law of 25 July 2015, in practice through a PSDC provider certified by ILNAS.

Does the ten-year clock start from the invoice date?

For accounting records it starts from the close of the financial year they relate to, not from the date on the document. An invoice from January 2026 in a year ending 31 December 2026 must be kept until the end of 2036.

Must my accounting data be hosted in Luxembourg?

Guichet.lu states that the place of retention for accounting records is Luxembourg. How that plays out for cloud hosting has to be assessed case by case, depending on your sector and any specific obligations. It is a question to put to your host, contract in hand.

Can Odoo be a PSDC?

No. PSDC status is granted by ILNAS to a certified legal entity, not to a piece of software. An integrator or an archiving provider can be a PSDC; an ERP as such cannot.

Going further

• The FAIA audit file in Luxembourg: generating it from Odoo
• Odoo invoice OCR: ending manual entry of vendor bills
• E-invoicing in Luxembourg: obligations, Peppol and Odoo
• Setting up Luxembourg accounting in Odoo: PCN, FAIA and eCDF
• Odoo in Luxembourg: is it the right ERP for your SME?

Why Advena?

Archiving is the exact point where legal, accounting and IT all pass the ball to each other. We hold all three ends: the retention rule, the ERP configuration that makes it workable, and the export that lets you answer an audit without losing a week. Nothing spectacular, just enough to sleep soundly for ten years.