No fixed price, but clear cost factors
The EUDR Regulation itself does not specify an amount for retaining documents. What the Regulation does require is that you retain the documentation underlying your due diligence statement for five years and make it available to the competent authority upon request. The costs involved do not arise from the law itself, but from the way you organise this: how many documents there are, how you store them and how quickly you can retrieve them.
For a trader with one product stream and a straightforward supplier list, the situation is different from that of an importer sourcing cocoa, coffee and timber from multiple countries. The number of product streams, the number of suppliers per stream and the extent to which geodata and documents already arrive digitally together determine how much time and what system you need.
What exactly must be retained
The scope of the file differs by commodity and by supply chain. For timber, it often involves felling permits and transport documents; for cocoa, cooperative and plot data; for beef products, animal data and slaughterhouse information. Anyone who is unclear about which documents are relevant for their own product stream risks building incomplete or duplicate files, which further increases costs. identified which documents are needed per commodity provides a starting point for this, although the final choice of which documents you include remains yours and, where necessary, your legal advisor's.
In-house storage versus a system that structures it for you
Part of the costs lie in the infrastructure: an archive that lasts five years, is searchable and links documents to the correct plots and suppliers. Companies that build this internally spend time setting up and maintaining such a system, and manually linking documents to the correct product stream. A platform that structures files per product stream and centrally retains the associated documents shifts that effort from your own team to a fixed, predictable cost item. What this concretely means and what it includes can be found on the overview of subscriptions and what they include.
Accessibility as a hidden cost factor
Retention alone is not enough: the documentation must also be able to be submitted quickly and traceable upon request from a supervisory authority. Documents scattered across mailboxes, shared drives and loose folders with different colleagues cost far more time when it matters than documents stored in a structured manner from the outset. That search time is a real cost item, even if it does not appear as such on an invoice.
Moreover, the obligation does not start at the same time for every company. Which documents you must retain from when depends on your role in the supply chain and on the product you trade. If you are still unclear about this, you can in five questions see where you stand have it clarified, so that the planning of your file aligns with the date that applies to you.
What keeps costs in check in practice
Three choices have the greatest effect on what retaining documentation ultimately costs you. First: how early you start structuring, rather than building an archive afterwards when documents have already become scattered. Second: whether documents and geodata are linked to a fixed file per product stream, or remain separate from each other. Third: whether the system you use automatically tracks which documents belong to which statement, or whether this must be done manually at each audit.
If you want to see how such a structured file is built and where the underlying information comes from, you will find that on see where the information comes from. The ultimate legal risk assessment and the choice of which documents provide sufficient substantiation remain with the operator itself; a system can structure and retain records, but cannot take over that assessment.
Would you like to first know what obligation applies to your role and product before you estimate storage costs? The free role check provides initial guidance in a few questions, without requiring you to set up an account right away.