There are two separate periods. Article 253 of Turkey's Tax Procedure Law requires books and documents to be kept for five years, starting from the calendar year following the year they relate to; Article 82 of the Turkish Commercial Code requires ten years for commercial books, financial statements, and business correspondence. In practice, the longer period is the one that governs.
Which date the period starts from
The period starts at the end of the calendar year the document relates to. The date it was issued doesn't start the clock. For an invoice belonging to 2026, the five-year period begins on 1 January 2027. For commercial books, the period is counted from the end of the year the last entry was made.
What electronic archiving requires
Keeping documents electronically is allowed, but there are two conditions. The records have to be reachable at any moment throughout the retention period, and they have to be made readable within a reasonable time. The Tax Procedure Law also requires the information and passwords needed to access the records to be kept and produced on request.
In practice this produces three rules.
- The archive shouldn't sit inside a personal account — it should be under the organization's control
- The folder structure should be built by year and document type, and search time should be measured in minutes
- Access should be tied to a role, not a person, so the archive isn't lost with a departing employee
Contracts have a separate point. The retention period starts after the year the last transaction the contract produced is completed. The signature date doesn't start the clock. On long-term maintenance and subscription contracts, the gap between the two dates reaches several years, and files deleted from the archive too early come up missing in an audit.
Gathering the archive in one place
Lodrive works with folder-based permissions, so sharing only the relevant folder with an auditor is possible over a link. Contract renewal and filing dates go onto a shared calendar in Calendar. The modules finance teams use are listed on the Finance Teams page.
Here's the limit: Lodrive is a general-purpose file space, not an e-ledger or e-invoice archiving service. The legal retention obligation still rests with the taxpayer, and storage is capped by plan — the Basic plan gives 30 GB.
The per-person calculation of subscription costs sits in the software cost breakdown.
FAQ
Is it five years or ten? The two laws set different periods. For businesses that qualify as merchants, the ten-year period is longer, so in practice that's the one that governs.
Is keeping documents on paper mandatory? Electronic retention is possible, provided the records stay accessible and readable throughout the period.