The Challenge
A mid-sized trading company faced a serious compliance problem: its existing document storage met neither the requirements of the GoBD (German principles for the proper keeping and retention of books and records) nor those of the GDPdU (German principles for data access and auditability of digital documents). Invoices, contracts and business correspondence were stored in an unstructured folder hierarchy on the file server, with no versioning, no access logging and no defined retention periods.
When a tax audit was announced, it became clear that the company could neither prove that documents had remained unchanged since archiving nor provide a structured export of tax-relevant records.
Our Solution
We implemented a complete DocuWare integration that covers the entire document lifecycle in a GoBD-compliant way:
Automatic Document Classification
Incoming documents are automatically recognized and categorized on upload:
- Invoices are identified by invoice numbers, amounts and VAT IDs
- Contracts are classified by keywords and structural features
- Business correspondence is assigned by sender and subject
- Misclassified documents can be corrected manually, and this change is also recorded in the audit trail
Retention Policies
Based on the document classification, automatic retention periods apply:
- 10 years for accounting vouchers, invoices, annual financial statements and inventories
- 6 years for commercial and business letters and other tax-relevant documents
- Periods automatically start at the end of the calendar year in which the document was created
- Documents within their retention period are protected against deletion
Audit-Proof Audit Trail
Every interaction with a document is logged without gaps:
- Who viewed, downloaded or printed which document, and when?
- All metadata changes are stored with a timestamp and user ID
- The audit trail itself is immutable and tamper-proof
- Hash values secure the integrity of every archived document
Tax Audit Export
For access by the tax authorities, we implemented a structured export mechanism:
- GDPdU-compliant data export in the prescribed format
- Filtering by period, document type and cost unit
- Complete index of all exported documents
- The export can be provided on an encrypted storage medium
The Result
- Full GoBD/GDPdU compliance, confirmed by the tax advisor and successful in the next tax audit
- Automatic classification with a hit rate above 95% significantly reduces manual effort
- Complete audit trail for every single document since the migration
- Tax audit export in under 30 minutes instead of several days of manual compilation