What to Keep on the Client File, and Why “Seven Years” Is Not the Whole Answer

Ask how long an advice file has to be kept and the answer comes back quickly: seven years. It is close enough to right that nobody questions it, and loose enough to hide three things that matter when someone actually asks for the file. Seven years from when, of what, and does it have to be the document or just the advice?

The rules sit in different places, and they do not all start the clock on the same day or cover the same things. Here they are, from the Corporations Act 2001, the Corporations Regulations 2001, and the ASIC instrument that added a record-keeping section in 2024.

The Statement of Advice, and what it refers to

Regulation 7.7.09C is short: a Statement of Advice, "and a document, or part of a document, mentioned in the Statement", must be kept by the providing entity that gave it, for seven years after the day the Statement is provided to the client.

The phrase that does the work is "mentioned in the Statement". An SoA that says the recommended product's fees are set out in the attached schedule, or refers the client to a Product Disclosure Statement, has brought that document inside the obligation. Keeping the SoA alone is not keeping what reg 7.7.09C requires.

The steps behind the advice

The SoA records the advice. Since September 2024 there is a separate obligation to keep the evidence of how the advice was reached. The ASIC Corporations (Record-Keeping Requirements for Australian Financial Services Licensees when Giving Personal Advice) Instrument 2024/508 inserts a section 912G into the Act as it applies to licensees and their authorised representatives. It is not in the Act's own text, which is why it is easy to miss.

Under s912G(2), when personal advice is given to a retail client, the licensee must ensure records are kept of:

• the information relied on and the action taken that indicates the adviser acted in the client's best interests under s961B(1);
• where the safe harbour in s961B(2) is relied on, the information relied on and the action taken that satisfies those steps;
• the advice given, including the reasons it would be reasonable to conclude, under s961G, that it is appropriate to the client;
• where there is a conflict between the client's interests and those of a person in s961J(1), the information relied on and the action taken to give priority to the client's interests.

Under s912G(3) these records must be kept for seven years after the day the personal advice was provided, and be accessible to the licensee throughout that period in a way that lets it produce them, even if it stops being a licensee. Where an authorised representative keeps them, s912G(4) requires the representative to give them to the licensee on request within that period, and otherwise to keep them for the same seven years.

Two limits are worth knowing. Most of s912G does not apply to personal advice for which no SoA is required, or for which a record is kept under s946B(3A); the conflicts record in s912G(2)(d) still does (s912G(7)). And the instrument is repealed at the start of 1 October 2029. The instrument does not say what follows it, so a file policy written today should name the obligation each record meets.

When there is no SoA

A Record of Advice has its own rules. For further advice, s946B(3A) requires the providing entity to keep a record of it, and reg 7.7.09 sets out what the record must contain and adds two things that matter for practice: the providing entity "may keep the record in any form, for example, a tape recording", and it must keep the record for seven years after the day the further advice is provided.

For small investment advice, s946AA(4) requires a record and reg 7.7.08C sets its content: brief particulars of the recommendations and their basis, and the replacement information s947D would have required. For advice with no recommendation to buy or sell, reg 7.7.10AAA sets the content of the record. We did not find a separate retention period written into either of those two regulations, and we have not stated one here. That is a question for the practice's own compliance adviser, not a gap to fill with a number.

The client's side of the same seven years

The client has a right that runs alongside these. Regulations 7.7.05 and 7.7.08 fix the period within which a client may request a record of advice, referred to in the Financial Services Guide, at seven years after the day the advice is provided. A practice that disposes of records at the earliest date its own obligations allow can still be asked, inside the client's period, for a record it no longer has.

What counts as a record

The form question has a clear answer. RG 175.337 says records "may take various forms, and do not have to be paper based", and lists the advice document, file notes including records of conversations, correspondence, working papers, the fact-finding documents used to make inquiries into the client's relevant circumstances, and audio recordings.

That list is broader than most practices treat as "the file". It includes the material that goes into an SoA, not only the SoA. In BackPro a drafting run can take a meeting recording and documents picked from where the practice already keeps them as inputs, and reviews what was read from those documents before anything is written. Each of those inputs is a kind of record RG 175.337 names. The safe assumption is that what an adviser relied on to write the advice is part of the record of how it was reached, and that throwing it away once the SoA is signed removes the evidence s912G asks the licensee to keep.

Seven years is the right number for most of what is on a client file. It is the wrong summary of the rules, because the rules differ on what must be kept and when the clock starts, and one of them has an end date of its own.