Thailand is the land of paperwork. This is true when you run a business here. Everything you do requires piles of paperwork. Even if it’s something like updating your address at a bank, you need at least five different documents.
When paperwork adds up, in the end, your office will be full of documents.
In this article, we will guide you through the kinds of documents you should keep in Thailand, and how.
Licenses and Certificates
Upon receiving any licenses and certificates, you should scan and keep them in a safe place all the time.
This includes your company registration certificate and other documents you get when setting up a company, VAT registration certificate, BOI promotion certificate, and other licenses for running your business.
Most of the time you won’t need them. But someone may ask for them from time to time.
Accounting Documents
You normally need to keep accounting records and supporting documents for at least five years under the Accounting Act. In some cases, the Director-General of the Department of Business Development can order them to be kept for up to seven years.
For tax purposes, however, the Revenue Department may be able to assess tax further back in specific cases, including up to 10 years if a required tax return was not filed. Because of this, many companies keep accounting and tax documents for 10 years.
If your office doesn’t have enough space to hold the documents for 10 years, you should have at least the last year of accounting documents with you. The other nine years can be kept at a self-storage facility.
Accounting documents in this place mean all documents that are related to your company expenses, income, tax filing receipts, financial statements, and so on.
Contracts
Saving contracts protects you if any lawsuits or disputes happen in the future.
The number of years you need to keep them depends on the contract purpose and its period.
In general, it goes like this:
- if it’s a business contract involving compensation, keep it for 10 years
- if it’s related to tax filing, keep it for 10 years
- if it’s related to an employee, including an employee contract, salary, overtime pay, and so on, keep it for at least two years, and longer if a labor complaint or dispute is pending
Employee Documents
You should keep most employee-related documents for at least two years after the employee quits the company for the same reason as keeping the contract: to prevent a certain employee from filing a case against you in court. If a labor complaint or lawsuit is pending, keep the relevant records until the case is final.
But when it comes to employee documents that are related to tax filing, you should keep them for 10 years.
Other Documents
For other unimportant documents, including applications, many companies set a retention period, such as one year, before destroying them, as long as there is no legal, tax, labor, or business reason to keep them longer.
Self-Storage Companies
With all the documents you need to keep, it’s hard to keep everything in your office. This is where self-storage companies come into play.
For our company, we use DataSafe for document storage. You need to contact them directly for current rates. Each box can hold 1,000 A4 sheets of paper.
We call them to give us their boxes. We make our internal code in each box, put our documents inside, and call them to pick it up.
We have a separate file for the internal code to let us know which documents are being kept with them.
When we need a document, we tell them the code, and they deliver to us within 24 hours.
One crucial point is that if you store your accounting documents outside your registered office or usual bookkeeping place, you may need to notify or get approval from the relevant authority, such as the Department of Business Development and, for some tax or VAT records, the Revenue Department. Check this with your accountant each year.
DataSafe tells us what documents we need and reminds us when we need to do it.
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