Archiving Magic Heidi invoices and receipts

Why a separate archive?

Invoices and expense receipts are accounting vouchers. Under the Code of Obligations (OR) they must be kept for ten years from the end of the business year (Art. 958f para. 1 OR). And under the Accounts Ordinance (GeBüV) they must be kept in such a way that any change can be detected (Art. 3 GeBüV). In a program you work with, a lot can be changed on purpose: you correct drafts, add to receipts, delete entries made by mistake. An archive does the opposite. It takes a file, records its state and allows no further change until the end of the retention period.

The archive also gives you a second, independent copy of your records, which you can export in full as long as you have an active subscription or the free 12 months are running. With a paid Magic Heidi subscription the archive is included if you use the same email address for both products.

Step by step

1. Create a backup in Magic Heidi. In Magic Heidi, create the backup for the year you want. You get a ZIP file with your invoices and expense receipts.
2. Sign in to Magic Heidi Archiv. Enter your email address and open the sign-in link. The first time, you give your company and the end of your business year.
3. Choose the business year and the period. At the top, set the business year the backup belongs to. The period is usually 10 years.
4. Drag in the ZIP. Add the ZIP as it comes from Magic Heidi, without unpacking it or adding anything first. Magic Heidi Archiv splits it into its files and archives each one separately.
5. Check the result. Once the ZIP is added, you see how many files were archived. In the document list you can filter by the source “Magic Heidi”.

What Magic Heidi Archiv recognises in the backup

The backup has a fixed structure: a folder invoices with the invoices as PDFs and a folder expenses with one subfolder per expense, named after its date and amount. If a ZIP contains only these two folders, Magic Heidi Archiv treats it as a Magic Heidi backup:

• Files under invoices are labelled as invoices.
• Files under expenses are labelled as expenses; the document date and amount are taken from the folder name.
• The original path in the ZIP stays visible and searchable for every document.

The content of the files is not read: there is no text recognition. The files themselves are stored unchanged, byte for byte as they are in the ZIP.

What happens to each document

• It gets a SHA-256 checksum and an entry in the chained journal.
• The journal is given an RFC 3161 timestamp from an independent time-stamping authority.
• It is stored in the Google Cloud in Zurich and locked against deletion and overwriting until the end of the retention period.
• It is compared with its checksum every night.

When and how often?

A fixed date makes sense: once after the year-end closing, when the invoices and receipts of the business year are complete. If you prefer to archive as you go, you can also add the backup several times a year. Magic Heidi Archiv recognises files with identical content by their checksum and does not store them twice. If a file has changed since last time, for example because a PDF was generated again, it is archived as a further document. Earlier versions are kept, because nothing in the archive is ever overwritten.

Remember: what has been archived stays until the end of the retention period. Check the chosen business year before you add the ZIP.

Limits

• The archive’s limits apply: 1 GB per file or ZIP, up to 5000 files and 2 GB unpacked. Split larger backups into several parts.
• There is no direct connection between Magic Heidi and Magic Heidi Archiv. Everything goes through the backup ZIP.
• The annual report and the audit report must also be kept as signed originals (Art. 958f para. 2 OR).

What else belongs in the archive

The backup covers invoices and expense receipts. Business records usually include other files too, which you can add one by one or as a ZIP of their own: bank statements, payroll records, contracts, the annual accounts and the VAT returns. The periods that apply to them are explained in the guide on the retention duty; what a digital archive has to do is in GeBüV explained simply.