Electronically Storing VAT Invoices

[MDE200]

All VAT invoices for my purchases are sent to me in a PDF to my email.
This is a personal email, so all the invoices are mixed in with personal emails. However I can pick out any purchase invoice easily and quickly using the search bar.

Is this acceptable to HMRC or is it required to have them all in some sort of order?
If HMRC were to request to see any invoice, I could easily find it in a matter of seconds.

 

[AccountantinP]

If you are confident that you can find them there is no legislation dictating how you must keep your records. If you do not have a horrific amount of invoices it may be prudent to download your invoices and save them together - make life much easier in the long run!

The short answer though is yes.

 

[Alan]

Although think about backup. If you email say gets hacked and erased.

Prudent to download an store copies.

 

[faradaykeynes]

If you are using any loud based software like Xero or Quick books etc they have facility to use Receipt bank which can not only scan and store invoice but link to nominal entry, which means you can access copy of invoice instantly.
Scanning also feed data to accounting system

 

[ffox]

If HMRC were to request to see any invoice, I could easily find it in a matter of seconds.

Electronically stored records are fine with HMRC.
Download them from email and store them in a cloud resource, keeping at least one local copy and one in the cloud.
With G-Suite or Google apps create an Invoices folder. With Office 365 you can do this better by creating a SharePoint library called Invoices.

Libraries are searchable and SP will automatically log an entry creation date for each uploaded invoice so you can locate by date range. You can also add tags to each invoice, such as customer name, order number etc. And use these for rapid find.