Data retention and deletion

How long records are kept is a rule with a specific source, not a general policy — the ATO sets it, and Snap Apps enforces it as data rather than as a document nobody reads.

The five-year rule

The ATO requires most business records to be kept for five years from the date they were prepared or obtained, or from when the relevant transaction was completed — whichever is later. Every document in Snap Apps carries its own retention date calculated this way, and it cannot be deleted before that date passes.

Why the original image is kept exactly as captured

The ATO only accepts an electronic copy as a valid record if it is a true and clear reproduction of the original. So the original bytes are never edited, recompressed, or overwritten — a separate, normalised copy is derived for the extraction model to read, and the original is what's retained as your legal evidence.

The purge job

Once a record's retention period has passed, it becomes eligible for deletion and is removed by an automated job rather than sitting there indefinitely by default. Active removal, not indefinite storage, is the intended behaviour — keeping data past the point it serves a purpose is itself something the Privacy Act expects a business to avoid.

Asking for deletion sooner

You can ask for your account and its data to be deleted at any time through Support. Records still inside their mandatory five-year retention window can be closed out and hidden from normal use, but the underlying record itself is kept until that window passes — Snap Apps cannot delete something the ATO requires it to still be able to produce. See Privacy Policy and Data handling & security for the full detail.