How Long Should A Business Keep Credit Card Receipts
One thing you may have wondered about if your small business has recently been set up to accept credit cards is how long you should keep the receipts. There is some confusion about this, with some sources saying they need to be kept for several years.
The truth is, your small business should keep legible copies of sales receipts for 18 months in order to have them on-hand for any disputes or chargebacks. Chargebacks are cases where customers believe they have not received what they were promised or tried to return an item and were unable to within a store's return policy. In these cases, credit card companies will cancel the charge and attempt to collect it from you, the merchant.
You should keep business credit card receipts in a locked file cabinet or a safe. Then, after 18 months is over, you should shred the receipts to protect the personal information of the cardholders.
While you certainly can shred credit card receipts the day they're done, if a customer requests a chargeback, you won't have a legal leg to stand on without it. So, keeping them for 18 months is not a law, but rather a recommendation.
On the other hand, you need to destroy credit card information regularly. If you store bags of receipts in an office or cupboard, but not locked up, and a thief walks in and takes them, many people's credit card information could be compromised, and that will most definitely be harmful to your visit. In some businesses, years worth of credit card receipts can sit for years in storerooms where an employee could take them and nobody would notice them missing for a very long time, if ever.
The information on these receipts can be sold easily to those who would use them fraudulently. If the information is breached due to your negligence, you could be fined for it.
Because you will most likely want to store receipts for 18 months to have available in the event of a chargeback, when you set your small business up to accept credit card payments, you should invest in a locking file cabinet or safe that will be large enough to hold 18 months worth of receipts. Of course, the size of the safe or file cabinet will depend on your business volume and how many transactions are paid for with credit cards.
