A contract expires, the relationship ends, and the instinct for a lot of small businesses is to clean house: delete the file, archive the email, move on. In New Zealand, that instinct runs ahead of the actual rules. Business records, contracts included, generally need to be kept for a minimum period well beyond the life of the agreement itself.
The general rule: seven years
Under New Zealand's tax and companies legislation, businesses are generally required to keep financial and business records, including contracts relevant to income and expenditure, for at least seven years. This covers the records Inland Revenue may need to verify a tax position, and the records the Companies Act expects a company to retain to explain its transactions and financial position.
The seven-year clock typically runs from the end of the relevant financial year or tax period, not from the date the contract was signed or expired. A contract that ran for two years but influenced a tax position several years later may need to be retained for longer than the contract term alone would suggest.
What this means for contracts specifically
Any contract with a financial dimension, vendor agreements, service contracts, lease agreements, loan or finance arrangements, generally falls under this retention expectation. Some categories run longer in practice: employment records often warrant longer retention given potential future claims, and certain regulated industries have their own specific requirements on top of the general rule.
This is general information, not legal or tax advice. For anything unusual, high value, or specific to a regulated industry, it is worth confirming retention requirements with an accountant or lawyer rather than relying on a general rule of thumb.
Where SMEs actually get caught out
The retention period is rarely the actual problem. The real issue is that most small businesses have no consistent system for keeping expired contracts at all, let alone for seven years. Once a vendor relationship ends, the contract often disappears along with the inbox thread it arrived in, or gets buried in a folder nobody revisits. If Inland Revenue or an auditor asks for a contract that expired four years ago, the honest answer in a lot of small businesses is that nobody is sure where it is.
The businesses that handle this well are not the ones with the most sophisticated archiving process. They are the ones where every contract, active or expired, lives in the same searchable place from the day it is signed.
How Miova handles this without extra effort
Miova does not delete a contract once it expires or is terminated. Every agreement stays in your centralised repository, searchable by vendor, date or keyword, long after the relationship has ended. Because contracts are captured automatically on upload rather than manually filed, there is no separate archiving step to remember, and no risk of an expired contract quietly disappearing from an inbox that gets cleaned out.
For a business trying to meet a seven-year retention expectation, that turns a compliance requirement most SMEs handle informally, if at all, into something that happens automatically as a side effect of normal contract tracking.
The bottom line
New Zealand's general rule of thumb is a minimum of seven years for business records, contracts included, and the clock usually runs from the relevant financial year rather than the contract's end date. The signing and the term of the contract are rarely where SMEs run into trouble. It is what happens to the document afterwards, and whether it can still be found years later, that actually matters.