With the 2017 tax return, the document requirement for private households will be abolished. Then documents only have to be submitted upon request by the tax office. Here we tell you what this means for the storage of your documents.
I can do my tax return completely digitally and only need digital or digitised documents to enter the required information and details. Normally, I do not have to submit any documents with my tax return. Official information from ELSTER states:
[...] often, when filing tax returns, receipts are submitted that are not required by the tax office. […]
Due to the abolition of the obligation to submit receipts, donation receipts, for example, no longer have to be submitted as of the 2017 tax return, but only have to be kept ready in case the tax office wants to check them in particular. If expenses have been incurred due to special life circumstances, it is still recommended to submit receipts together with your tax return. All other receipts must only be submitted upon request by the tax office. This applies, for example, to receipts for work equipment, proof of contributions to professional associations and confirmations of insurance contributions. It is recommended that you keep all receipts handy until the tax assessment has become final, so that the tax office can deal with any queries.
One document that you should also keep is your income certificate. This may become relevant later when calculating your pension. In addition, since 2017, all craftsmen's invoices must be kept for at least two years. Special rules also apply to craftsmen's invoices, which are often forgotten, as tax advisor Dieter Albrecht explains: "It is quite common for an invoice to say 'We carried out gardening work on your house' and then there is only a lump sum, but no wage costs are shown. For tax purposes, however, it is a prerequisite that the labour costs are shown separately on the invoice and that they are not paid in cash but by bank transfer.
In the case of bank statements, it is advisable to keep them for at least three years in order to be able to prove the payment of a bill beyond doubt, if necessary.
In order not to lose track of all these regulations and the various papers, experts recommend planning one to two hours every week for office work. And all this just to have the documents ready in case of a very specific need? That seems like a lot. With a digital filing system, I am well prepared for the tax return. In order to still be able to find the originals at any time, we at fileee have developed the fileeeBox.
If the tax office requests an original document, the fileee app shows me in which box and at what level the document I am looking for is located. I don't have to spend time on time-consuming archiving of the originals and I can still find everything again. Otherwise, I do everything conveniently digitally.
If you have more questions about the electronic tax return and how you can best use your fileee account for this, then take a look at our tax return page.
