What is electronic document archiving?
Electronic archiving is the organized, legally-compliant retention of a company's documents in digital form.
Short answer
- Electronic archiving means keeping a company's documents in digital form, structured and with a retention period set for each type.
- It is not the same as "I scan it and put the files in a folder": a real archive has a records schedule, an inventory and an access record.
- The digital format does not change the legal retention periods — these are calculated per document type, not per medium.
- The framework is the national archive law, supplemented by the rules for documents kept in electronic form.
What the law says (in brief)
- The national archive law: every company is a creator and holder of documents and must draw up its own records retention schedule.
- The law on archiving documents in electronic form governs their storage in digital format and the role of the electronic archive administrator.
- The accounting law sets, as a general rule, 10 years for registers and supporting documents, and a longer period for payroll records.
- The national accounting regulations set a shorter period, of 5 years, for some financial-accounting documents.
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), Art. 5(1)(e): personal data is not kept longer than is necessary for the purpose.
Practical examples
- A company with 40 employees scans 12 binders of internal decisions, indexes them by year and department, and frees up three storage shelves.
- A delivery note received as an electronic file is registered directly in digital form, with a registration number, and is no longer printed.
- An employee's personnel file is closed when they leave, but the corresponding payroll record stays in the archive for the full statutory period.
- An operating permit issued in 2019 is still retrievable in 2026 in exactly the same form, with its full access history.
Common mistakes
- The archive is actually a shared folder: no records schedule, no inventory, no periods.
- Documents are scanned without OCR, so they exist in the archive but can't be found by content.
- Deletion happens "when the disk fills up", not when the legal period expires.
- Nobody can say who opened or downloaded a document, or when.
- The paper is destroyed before checking whether the original is mandatory for that type of document.
How 4docs helps
- You structure the archive by fund, inventory and document type, exactly as in the company's records schedule.
- Every file gets a retention period and an automatically calculated expiry date.
- You search inside the content of scanned documents, not just the file name.
- The access log shows who viewed, downloaded or shared each document.
Contract lifecycle management and digital signing are not part of 4docs. For contracts and digital signing there is a dedicated product in the ecosystem: 4mycontracts.net