Keep the boring things longest

Keep money records for years and delete client material within weeks of delivery. Two clocks run on every job: a dispute or chargeback can land months after delivery, and a tax deadline looks backwards over a whole year.

Your retention period is set by whichever clock is slower, which is almost always the tax one.

The two categories, and their different clocks

Money records are the ones with a long life: what you invoiced, what arrived, what the platform deducted, what you paid out, what you spent to earn it. Tax authorities generally expect several years of these, and the exact number differs by country - check yours rather than trusting a figure from a post written somewhere else. Two examples show the spread: HMRC asks the UK self-employed to keep records for at least 5 years after the 31 January submission deadline, while the IRS baseline is 3 years, rising to 6 if unreported income exceeds 25% of the gross shown on the return. Note that the clock often starts at the filing deadline rather than at the transaction.

Job records are the ones that protect you in a dispute: the confirmation, the brief, the delivery timestamp, the revision correspondence. These matter for as long as the payment can be reversed, which is set by card scheme rules rather than by the platform, and is typically months rather than weeks. Twelve months after delivery costs nothing, because they are text.

Client material is the third thing and it runs the other way. Photographs and recordings a buyer sent you are not your records, they are their material, held for a purpose that ended on delivery.

Deleting client material is part of the job

Keep it while the job and its revision window are open, then delete it. That is the whole policy, and it is why the deadline in your revision policy earns its place twice over.

Delete means everywhere: the working folder, the downloads folder, the phone that took the screenshot, the cloud sync that copied it three times, and the backup that will restore it next month. Most accidental retention is a sync you forgot about rather than a decision.

Say the policy on your listing in one line. It is one of the few concrete trust signals available to someone with no reviews. The general principles around holding other people's images sit with the reference on photo handling rather than here, and the wider question of what a platform itself retains about both sides is covered in the account of identity and data handling in this sector.

Platform history is not a record you control

Your order list, message history and earnings dashboard are conveniences the platform lends you. They disappear on suspension, on account closure, and on whatever retention policy the platform runs, which is usually shorter than yours needs to be.

So export monthly: the statement, the order list, and anything the platform lets you download as a file rather than read on a screen. Ten minutes a month, filed by year, and the same export doubles as your tax working - the fuller argument is in why an account is not an asset you own.

Keeping your own numbers rather than trusting a dashboard is the discipline that applies to any measured thing over time, and the general case for owning your dataset makes the point in a different context without changing.

Where to put it

One folder per tax year, three subfolders: statements, job records, receipts. Two copies, one of them somewhere that is not your laptop. Plain files with dates in the names, not a database and not an app with a subscription, because the thing you need in three years is the thing that still opens.

What is worth capturing at the moment of each job is listed in the records you will wish you kept.

Nothing here is tax advice, and retention periods genuinely differ by country. Rate Cock's judges page sets out what its own order flow keeps, which tells you which of the above you are duplicating and which you are the only copy of.