Wellrun guide

How to organise business records so someone else can find them

Give each kind of record one home, name every file for what it is, who it involves and its date, and write down the dates a document does not show on its front page. Your records are organised when somebody other than you can find any of them in ten minutes without ringing you. Keep general business and tax records for five years, and anything touching employment for seven.

By Wellrun. Last updated 15 October 2026.

Most Australian small businesses do not have a document problem. They have a findability problem. The lease exists. The insurance certificate exists. The supplier agreement exists. They are in an inbox, a filing cabinet, a laptop, and a folder on a phone, and exactly one person knows which.

That is fine right up until it is not: when someone is away, when an insurer asks, when a buyer's solicitor sends a list. The fix is not more storage. It is a small number of decisions applied consistently.

How do you know whether your records are organised?

The test is whether somebody other than you could find a given document in ten minutes without ringing you. It is not whether you have it: everyone has it somewhere.

Could someone other than you find this document in ten minutes, without ringing you?

If the answer is no, the record is not organised, no matter how carefully it is stored. Everything below is in service of that one question.

One document, one place

The most common failure is not a missing document. It is four copies of a document in four places, three of them out of date, and no way to tell which is current.

Pick one home for each kind of record and keep it there. A lease lives with the premises records, whether the accountant sent it, the agent sent it, or you found it in a drawer. Where it came from is worth recording; it is not worth filing by.

The instinct to make a folder called "From the accountant" is understandable and it is a trap. Six months later you have two filing systems that disagree, and the question "where is the lease" has two answers.

Name things for the person who has not seen them

File names written by the person who created the document are almost always too short, because that person has the context in their head. Scan_0043.pdf and lease final FINAL v3.pdf are both records of the same failure.

A name that survives has three parts: what it is, who it involves, and when it starts or was signed.

• Lease, 14 Marine Parade, commenced 1 July 2024
• Public liability policy, CGU, expires 30 June 2027
• Supply agreement, Reece, signed 12 March 2025

Dates in the name matter more than they look. Half the questions asked about a business document are really questions about time: is this the current one, when does it run out, was this before or after the change.

Record the date the document does not tell you

Many business records have a date that matters and is not printed on the front page. A lease has an option window buried in a clause. A licence has an expiry. A warranty ends. A service falls due.

Write those dates down somewhere you will actually look, at the moment you file the document, because that is the only moment you will ever have read it. Nobody re-reads a lease for fun.

There is more on this in how to keep track of licence and insurance expiry dates. In Wellrun, a date you record in the Licences and Insurance register comes back on the screen with the days to go, in your calendar, and in one email a week listing the dates coming up. Start your 7 free days, no card.

How long do you have to keep business records?

Keep general business and tax records for five years, and employee time and wages records for seven. The five years is the ATO's general rule, counted from when you prepared or obtained the record or completed the transaction, whichever is later. The seven years is set by section 535 of the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth). The two rules do not agree, which is where people come unstuck.

The practical answer for a small business with staff is to keep anything touching employment for seven years, because the longer obligation governs and sorting records by which rule applies is more work than simply keeping them.

The ATO accepts electronic records. Its conditions are the sensible ones: the records must be protected against alteration, you must be able to reconstruct the original data if you change systems, and you must be able to extract the data and convert it to a standard format such as CSV. A photograph of a receipt is a record. A photograph of a receipt on a phone that is about to be traded in is not.

Decide who should see what, once

Not everything should be open to everyone, and the answer is usually obvious once you ask the question directly. Operating procedures should be as open as possible, because the whole point is that people use them. Records about individual employees should not be, and that is not a matter of trust: it is other people's personal information, and they did not agree to it circulating. What has to be in one of those files, and how long it has to be kept, is set out in employee records.

The mistake is deciding this per document, on the day, under time pressure. Decide it once, by category, and let each new document inherit the answer.

What to do this week

1. List the systems, not the documents. Every place a business record currently lives: the email account, the accounting software, the drive, the drawer, the phone. You cannot organise what you have not admitted to.
2. Pick the ten documents someone would need if you were away for a month. Not the important ones in principle. The ones that would actually stop work.
3. Put those ten in one place, named properly, with their dates written down.
4. Then stop. The failure mode of this job is starting a full audit, getting a third of the way through, and abandoning it. Ten documents someone else can find beats four hundred nobody can.

Why this is worth doing before you need it

Every reason to organise records is a reason that arrives without notice. An insurance claim, an audit, an illness, an offer for the business. In each case the work is the same, and in each case it is far more expensive done under a deadline than done on an ordinary Tuesday.

It also compounds. A business whose records live in one person's memory is a business that cannot delegate and cannot take a holiday, and the same fact is the first thing a buyer's accountant asks about.