Records kept by policy, archives locked, and last year carried into this year
Every record class has a retention policy, a legal hold always prevails over it, and nothing is disposed of without three people. A finished audit file is locked and archived encrypted; next year's statements start from this year's issued figures.
South African law requires accounting records, tax records and audit documentation to be kept for set periods. Achekam applies a retention policy per record class, keeps the audit file locked once finished, and rolls last year's issued statements forward as this year's comparatives.
What it covers
- Retention by record class — Accounting records, tax records, audit documentation, FICA records, payroll records and others each have a retention policy and the date it starts from. A record whose policy or start date cannot be resolved is not eligible for disposal.
- Legal holds and governed disposal — An active legal hold always beats an expired retention period. Disposal needs three different people — a requester, a reviewer and an approver — and leaves a certificate that keeps proof, never the content.
- Locked, encrypted audit archives — A finished audit file is locked against change, archived encrypted, and released only by two people.
- Last year as this year's comparatives — Next year's statements start from last year's issued version on Achekam — its figures as presented, policies, notes and settings — or from the trial balance's prior-year column; each source is shown with its basis, and an unsigned draft is warned about.
What it does not do
- The retention periods are configured policies whose legal bases have not yet been confirmed by counsel; a firm should confirm them for its own practice.
The standard behind it
Companies Act 71 of 2008 and Tax Administration Act 28 of 2011, Companies Act section 24; Tax Administration Act section 29. The duties to keep accounting records and the records relevant to a tax return for the periods the Acts set.
Questions
- Can a client's files be downloaded if they leave the firm?
- Documents can be downloaded from the client's vault, and issued statements as their PDFs. For a full copy of a workspace's data, talk to us: the platform can take a backup of a firm's data before it closes.
