Keeping records in digital format

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PRADIP PATWARDHAN (Querist)
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23 December 2014 Dear all,

My query is regarding keeping records for the income tax and other indirect taxes. Now days we all are promoting about using e-paper, e-invoices to save a paper (to save the trees) but same time we need to keep records of business for long time for the department scrutiny, audit purpose. But instead of physical records we can keep some business related invoices or papers in format of soft copies and we can make it available in future while govt. scrutiny and other purpose. Now we see that in case of airline and railway traveling the railway and Airlines also allow soft copy of e-tickets then we don’t need to take a print out and can keep it in future for business traveling expenses purpose. So doubt is can we keep the records (which are not mandatory to print) in digital format (soft copy) instead of physical to minimize the records size and indirectly to save papers?? Please throw some lights on this issue with your expert opinions.
regards,
pradip

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Guest (Expert)

23 December 2014 Section 4 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (as ammended in 2008) allows maintenance of electronic records and gives legal recognition to documents maintained in electronic form provided the following two conditions are met w.r.t. the electronic records;

Such information should be
(a) rendered or made available in an electronic form; and
(b) accessible so as to be usable for a subsequent reference

CA Kumar Mukesh

CA Kumar Mukesh (Expert)
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24 December 2014 You can either to go with digitization or still have a manual system.

As Mr .Adil is rightly pointed out digitization (E-records) is also supported by the IT Act.

Further, going with digitization gives us ease doing business.

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