Vouchers and the Danish Bookkeeping Act: what a voucher must show, and how long it is kept

What a voucher must show

A voucher is the documentation for a transaction: proof that it happened and of what it consisted. The Danish Bookkeeping Act requires that every record in the books can be documented with a voucher, with an audit trail from entry to voucher and back. At a minimum, a voucher must show:

• When: the date of the transaction.
• How much: the amount, and the VAT separately if there is VAT.
• Who: the seller or the recipient, for an invoice with CVR number.
• What: what was bought or sold, so the entry can be coded correctly.
• How: how it was paid, if that is not evident from the bank.

For VAT deduction, the VAT Act has its own requirements: the invoice must be issued to the business and carry the seller's CVR number, invoice number, date, a description of the supply and the VAT amount. Till receipts and simplified invoices are accepted up to an amount limit, which is on skat.dk. A bank statement line is not a voucher for a purchase; it shows the payment, not what was bought.

Some entries have no document from another party: a depreciation, an accrual, a correction. There, the voucher is your own explanation, in the description or a note on the entry, so a reader four years on can see why it was made.

Keeping for five years

The Bookkeeping Act's general rule is that accounting records, vouchers included, are kept for five years from the end of the financial year they concern. A voucher from March 2026 in a company with a calendar-year financial year is therefore kept until the end of 2031. The keeping must be secure: nothing may be lost, and everything must stay retrievable and readable throughout, even if the business changes application or closes. The exact rules and exceptions are on erhvervsstyrelsen.dk.

The duty is the business's, not the application's. In practice, you must be able to take every voucher with you in a form that opens without the application it was made in, and do so before you close an account or switch systems.

Digital vouchers

A digital voucher is as valid as paper. A PDF invoice, an e-invoice, a photo of a till receipt and an email with an order confirmation are all vouchers, as long as they can be read and are kept with the entry. You need not keep the paper once you have a readable digital copy; it is the form the Bookkeeping Act assumes for digital bookkeeping.

What comes with it is order: a picture in a folder on your phone is a voucher, but not an audit trail. The voucher must be findable from the entry and the entry from the voucher, and it must sit where a mishap or a new phone cannot delete it.

The voucher stays with the entry in Veneti

In Veneti the voucher is part of the entry. Every journal line has a File column where the document sits, with the voucher number, date, amount and description beside it. That is the audit trail in one line. When the voucher is booked, the file travels with it into the booked records, where it cannot be changed or removed, and where it opens from Booked entries and from every figure in the reports.

A voucher that was booked without a file can have its file attached afterwards, once. The file can never be replaced or removed again. Customer invoices Veneti produces itself as PDF and keeps the same way, and an e-invoice is kept with its original XML document beside the PDF. The Receipts and documents page describes how the vouchers come in.

How to get the vouchers in

1. 1

   Send receipts to the company's own address

   The company has its own inbox for receipts. Forward a receipt there, and it finds the bank line it belongs to and attaches itself.

2. 2

   Connect Gmail or Outlook

   Veneti fetches receipts from your own email, so you need not forward them. What matches a bank line is attached.

3. 3

   Let supplier invoices come in by themselves

   Suppliers send to the company's invoice address or as e-invoices. The invoice becomes a voucher in the journal with supplier, amount and due date read, ready to be booked and paid. See Supplier invoices.

4. 4

   Upload the rest

   A photo of a till receipt or a PDF you have lying around you drag onto the line in the journal or attach to a booked voucher without a file.

5. 5

   Write the explanation on vouchers without a document

   Depreciation, accruals and corrections get their explanation in the description or in a note on the booked entry. The note can be added after booking.

6. 6

   Book

   A voucher with file, date, amount, account and offset account is ready. Once booked, file and entry are locked together. The basics are in Bookkeeping for beginners.

Take every voucher with you

The keeping duty follows the business, so you must be able to take every voucher with you. Under Download on Booked entries, the owner or an administrator orders an export of every voucher as ZIP files, optionally for a period. The files are ordered by financial year and voucher number, and every archive ends with an index that states, for each voucher, its number, date, text, amount, the file's name and its SHA-256 checksum, so the archive can be checked against the books and against itself. The voucher number is what ties the file to the entry in the SAF-T and CSV exports.

The export is built in the background, checked file by file before it is offered, and you get an email when it is ready; the archives can be fetched behind the sign-in for 14 days. It costs nothing, and it is open even if the subscription is paused. The export of the bookkeeping itself is described under Data export. To have the vouchers sit on the entries from the start, Get started.

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