The short answer
The Regulation requires operators and traders to retain the underlying documents of a due diligence declaration for five years. The point where things often go wrong is not the duration but the starting point: many SMEs calculate from the date of import, purchase or sale of the consignment. However, the Regulation ties the period to the moment when the due diligence declaration is submitted to the EU information system, not to a transaction date.
That difference can amount to weeks or months, and for seasonal consignments sometimes even more. If you use the wrong date as your starting point, you risk discarding documents too early or unnecessarily keeping them for too long. For the exact wording we refer you to the official text on EUR-Lex or to a legal advisor; below you will find how this works in practice.
Why the submission moment counts and not the transaction date
A due diligence declaration belongs to a specific consignment or shipment that you place on the market or trade. The declaration itself is submitted at the moment that consignment passes through the EU information system, and that moment is recorded with a timestamp. The retention obligation aligns with that registered moment, because the declaration and the underlying data are inextricably linked.
For a trader who processes small consignments of coffee or cocoa on an ongoing basis, this means that each declaration has its own timer. A dossier you submit in January has a different end date than a dossier for the same product you submit in October. If you keep track of this per product stream rather than per calendar year, you prevent documents from disappearing from your records too early.
What is covered by the retention obligation
The retention obligation does not only concern the submitted declaration itself. It also covers the geolocation data of the plots, the information on the country of origin and the risk classification associated with it, communication with suppliers on origin, and the substantiation of the risk assessment that underlies the declaration. In short: everything needed to reconstruct how the declaration was prepared.
For companies working with multiple commodities, such as an importer trading in both timber and rubber, this quickly spreads across separate dossiers, each with their own retention period. the knowledge base with explanations per commodity and situation goes into more detail on which documents per product are relevant.
What this means if you submit multiple declarations per year
For companies that import on an ongoing basis, a stacking of periods quickly emerges: each shipment with its own submission date, and thus its own expiry date for the retention obligation. Without systematic recording, it is difficult to determine later which dossier belongs to which declaration and when the retention period actually expires.
In practice, it therefore works better to link the retention period to the product stream and the submission date of the corresponding declaration, rather than to a fixed point in the year. This prevents you from deleting documents from one consignment too early because you used the date of another consignment as your reference.
How to organize this without it becoming a project in itself
For an SME without its own compliance department, maintaining separate periods per shipment quickly becomes error-prone if done in spreadsheets or email boxes. A structure in which each dossier is automatically linked to the submission date saves manual calculation work and prevents a period from expiring unnoticed.
Whether you set this up yourself or have it supported, the retention obligation remains a responsibility of the operator or trader themselves. How we record and secure the underlying data during that retention period can be read at the data security page. Those who first want to know which role and which obligation apply to their own business before the retention period becomes relevant typically start with the role check that shows your position in the supply chain in a few questions.
Finally
The duration of five years is not inherently the difficult part of this obligation; the starting point is, especially for businesses processing multiple batches per year. Those who bring structure per product stream and per submission date avoid most of the confusion.
Would you like to know which documents in your situation specifically fall under the retention obligation and how to organize this per product stream? Take the free role check or see what a dossier per product stream costs with us to see what structuring, validating and generating can mean for your business.