How to transfer the document archive to new software

What ten-year retention requires

Condominium documentation cannot be deleted at will: Article 1130 bis of the Italian Civil Code establishes that supporting documents of the management must be kept and made available to owners, and consolidated practice anchors them to the ordinary ten-year limitation term. At the handover between administrators, Article 1129 also obliges the outgoing one to deliver all documentation relating to the condominium and the owners.

This means transferring the archive is neither optional nor reducible to the last two or three years: the archive must remain complete and accessible. New software is an opportunity to digitise and tidy what may have been scattered between paper folders and computer directories, but completeness is a requirement, not an optional extra.

Sorting by condominium, year and type

The most frequent mistake is loading documents without a structure, ending up with an unmanageable archive. Before transferring, it is best to define a stable taxonomy: first level the condominium, second level the year or financial year, third level the category, for example meetings, accounting, contracts, plants, correspondence. The same structure should be replicated for each condominium, so anyone knows where to look.

File names should be normalised with a consistent criterion, for example date and short subject, avoiding generic titles like scan or document. A well-named file can be found even years later, whereas an archive of unnamed scans is effectively lost, even if formally retained.

Linking documents to accounting and meetings

The value of management software, compared with a plain folder of files, is the ability to link each document to its context: the invoice to the accounting movement and the supplier, the minutes to the meeting that produced them, the works contract to the expense and the condominium. These links make the archive navigable by relationship, not just by position in the folder.

During the transfer it is worth rebuilding at least the main links: associating minutes with the corresponding years and the decade's invoices with their entries where the software allows it. There is no need to link everything at once; it is best to prioritise the most consulted documents, minutes and statements, and the legally binding ones, contracts and policies.

Electronic invoices and tax documents

Electronic invoices have their own handling: the structured-format file that passed through the Interchange System (SdI) is the tax original and must be kept as such, not replaced by a printout. In the transfer you carry over the original files together with any legible courtesy copies, keeping the link with the supplier and the accounting entry.

The condominium's tax documents too, such as withholding-agent certifications and the forms relating to withholdings, fall within the archive to be kept. Checking, when choosing the software, how it handles the retention of electronic invoices avoids discovering later that the original files were treated as mere attachments with no tax value.

Verifying completeness and accessibility

Once the transfer is done, a completeness check per condominium is needed: presence of the minutes for each year, of approved statements, of contracts in progress and of the period's invoices. A verification list, ticked item by item, is more reliable than an at-a-glance review, because gaps in an archive go unnoticed until precisely that missing document is needed.

Finally, accessibility for those entitled must be verified: owners can request to inspect and extract copies of documents, and a well-organised digital archive, with a reserved area where available, makes this right immediate rather than a laborious search. Software like AmministraPro archives documents linking them to accounting, meetings and owners, with retention and a reserved area; the /funzioni page describes the document tools and /prezzi lists the plans that include them.

Frequently asked questions