Archives
Once a financial year is over, its paperwork no longer belongs in the vault you work in every day. Archiving sets it aside in a dated batch — “Financial year 2025” — that only authorised people open. Nothing is deleted, nothing is moved.
Updated on September 11, 2026
Why archive
A vault holding five years of paperwork becomes tiring to work in. Archiving tidies it up without losing anything.
- Folders show the current year only: archived paperwork drops out of lists, searches and folder counts.
- Nothing changes place. An archived purchase invoice stays in “Purchase invoices”, with its files, tags, comments and activity log untouched.
- An archived document can no longer be renamed, moved or deleted. A closed year stops being editable by accident.
- Only people holding the archiving permission still see archived paperwork — and your accounting firm, which always holds it on your file.
Three ways to archive
The same action at three scales. In all three, you file the documents into an existing archive or name a new one on the spot.
One document
The “Archive” action sits in the row menu and on the document itself. You pick the destination archive, or name one there and then.
A selection
On the web, the “Select” button in the toolbar ticks several documents — one click each, Shift and click for a whole range — and the bottom bar archives them in one go, up to five hundred at a time. On mobile, archive document by document or by period instead.
A period
“Archive a period” sweeps a date range across whole folders, subfolders included. This is the normal way to close out a financial year.
Archiving a period
Four settings, a counted preview, then the confirmation.
- 1
The period
Any date range: the calendar year for a standard financial year, a quarter or a half-year if your closing falls elsewhere.
- 2
Which date counts
The date the document was filed, or the date of the accounting record it is attached to. The next section explains which to pick.
- 3
The folders covered
Purchase invoices, sales invoices, bank statements and cash receipts are ticked by default. Add or remove folders freely; each ticked folder takes its subfolders with it.
- 4
The label and the preview
The label is pre-filled — “Financial year 2025” for a full calendar year — and stays editable. A preview announces how many documents will be archived, folder by folder, before you confirm.
Note
Which date the period runs on
A December invoice filed in January belongs to December's financial year, not January's. That is exactly what this setting is for.
Filing date
The date the document entered the vault. This is the default, the easiest to explain, and the only one that works for paperwork attached to no accounting record.
Record date
The issue date of the sales invoice, the date of the purchase invoice, the closing date of the bank statement, the date of the cash receipt. A document attached to no record falls back on its filing date.
Tip
What an archived document no longer allows
Archiving freezes the document. The following actions are refused until it is unarchived.
- Renaming it, moving it to another folder, changing its visibility rules.
- Adding or removing a file. An archived file is kept exactly as it is, down to skipping the automatic recompression that slims other documents.
- Adding a tag, removing one, writing a comment.
- Sending it to the bin. The other way round, a document already in the bin cannot be archived.
- Creating a public share link, editing it or sending it by email. An existing link can still be revoked.
- Acting as the source of an automatic reading — purchase invoice, bank statement, cash receipt — or answering a document request opened by your accounting firm.
What remains possible: opening the document, reading its files, downloading them, going back through its activity log. An archived document is readable, simply no longer editable.
The Archives screen
“Archives” sits in the vault toolbar, next to the bin. The page lists your archives from the most recent to the oldest, each with its period, its number of documents and their breakdown by original folder. Opening an archive shows its documents grouped by the folder they came from — Purchases, Sales, Statements, Receipts — exactly where they were filed. The Atlas assistant and agents connected over MCP do not search archives: their searches only cover live paperwork.
Note
Going back
Nothing about an archive is final.
- Unarchive — from the archive itself, select the documents to take out. They return to their folder immediately, editable again.
- Rename an archive — the label changes, the contents do not. Two archives in the same organization cannot share a label.
- Delete an archive — all its documents are unarchived first, then the archive disappears. No document is deleted along the way.
- An archive emptied of every document stays in the list: delete it yourself if you no longer want it.
The linked invoice carries on
Archiving a document does not archive the invoice, statement or receipt pointing at it. A purchase invoice whose supporting document is archived stays payable, chaseable and cancellable: its lifecycle is unchanged. Only the vault document becomes restricted.
Note
Who can archive
A single permission governs all of it: “Archive documents”. It grants the right to archive, to unarchive, to manage archives and to see archived paperwork. Without it, the Archives screen does not appear and archived documents cannot be reached — not in lists, not in search, not through a direct link.
Administrators only