Before you open Excel, it helps to know exactly which columns and sheets Czech tax records are legally required to have. This article first gives you a ready-to-use spreadsheet template you can start with today, and only then explains where that approach runs into limits in practice — and when it is worth switching to a dedicated tool. That saves you the time you would otherwise spend searching online right when you actually need the template.
This is based on the rules for Czech daňová evidence (tax records) under Section 7b of the Income Taxes Act, as they apply to a self-employed person (OSVČ, osoba samostatně výdělečně činná) in 2026.
What a tax-records spreadsheet needs to look like
Under Section 7b, Czech tax records must contain income and expenses broken down as needed to work out the tax base, plus an overview of assets and debts. In practice, that usually means three linked sheets: a cash journal (income and expenses), a register of receivables and payables, and an asset register. The law does not prescribe the format — a spreadsheet in Excel is exactly as valid as a dedicated program, as long as it contains the required information and can be relied on as evidence. The cash journal itself is kept chronologically — row by row, by the date of payment, not alphabetically by supplier or grouped by category — which makes it far easier to trace a specific line back to a bank statement.
| Column | Why you need it |
|---|---|
| Payment date | Income or an expense is recorded on the day money actually arrived or left, not the day the document was issued |
| Document number | Lets you trace back to the invoice or receipt the row relates to |
| Description | Without one, you will not remember six months later what an expense or an item of income actually was |
| Amount | The core figure used to calculate the tax base |
| Taxable / non-taxable | Not every expense or receipt counts toward the tax base |
| VAT rate and amount (VAT payers only) | Needed for the VAT return and the VAT control statement (kontrolní hlášení) |
| Category | Makes an annual breakdown by type of income or expense much easier |
| Business-use percentage (for mixed-use items) | For a phone, car, or internet connection also used privately, only the defensible business share is deductible |
Rules your records have to follow
- Entries are recorded by payment date, not by the date the invoice was issued — income for a Czech OSVČ using cash-basis tax records only arises once it is actually paid.
- A VAT payer keeps VAT recorded separately from the tax base, since it does not itself count as income or an expense.
- Every row needs a supporting document — a receipt or an invoice you can actually locate, not just a figure sitting in a spreadsheet cell.
- Carry out a year-end inventory of assets, stock, receivables, and debts as of 31 December.
- Keep your records and documents until the statutory assessment period expires — the basic period is 3 years, though in practice it is recommended to keep them longer.
A typical example of a business-use percentage: a phone used half for personal calls and half for work is usually claimed at 50%, while a car used mostly for business with occasional private trips is typically claimed at around 80%. You need to be able to justify whichever percentage you choose if the tax office (finanční úřad) ever asks — ideally applying the same method consistently all year, not adjusting it case by case.
Sample rows with realistic data
Here is what a simplified cash journal might look like for a freelancer, Anna Example, a non-VAT-registered self-employed person using 60% flat-rate expenses:
| Date | Document | Description | Income | Expense |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3 Feb 2026 | INV-2026-004 | Design work, Client ABC s.r.o. | 18,000 CZK | — |
| 7 Feb 2026 | EXP-0032 | Software subscription | — | 590 CZK |
| 14 Feb 2026 | INV-2026-005 | Website build, Company XYZ | 32,000 CZK | — |
Even with flat-rate expenses, Anna still keeps an income column with the matching invoice numbers next to it — without that, she would have no way to show a tax inspector where the year-end total actually came from.
If invoice INV-2026-005 were still unpaid on 31 December, it would belong in a separate register of receivables — it does not count toward income until the payment actually arrives, but it must still appear in the records, because it affects the year-end inventory. The same rule applies under flat-rate expenses: you still have to track the receivable, even though you are not tracking expense documents in detail.
6 things a spreadsheet will never catch for you
A spreadsheet satisfies the legal minimum. It does not, however, catch a number of practical issues that start costing you time as your document volume grows, or that become a real risk at audit time.
- A continuous invoice number sequence. Excel has no way of knowing you accidentally reused a number, or that a document is missing from the sequence.
- The link between a payment and an invoice. A "paid yes/no" column has to be checked and updated by hand, row by row.
- VAT and the control statement, for a VAT payer. Excel will not generate the XML file for the tax authority's MOJE daně portal, and it will not flag a supply that does not belong in the control statement at all.
- Document attachments. A receipt or invoice is not stored inside Excel — you need a separate folder and have to remember which file belongs to which row.
- Deadlines and advance payments. Excel will not warn you that a filing deadline or a social/health insurance advance payment is approaching.
- An audit trail. If you correct last year's row, the spreadsheet does not remember what it looked like before — that is a weak point at audit time.
There is a seventh practical issue on top of these: sharing the file with an accountant. Sending one file to your accountant is easy; keeping two people's simultaneous edits to the same spreadsheet in sync without conflicts, in practice, usually is not. Even after years of use, Excel essentially stays a table of numbers — the context and connections behind each row are something you have to keep track of yourself, in your head, in an email thread, or in a folder of paper documents.
How much time manual record-keeping actually costs
At 15 received documents a month and roughly five minutes spent manually re-typing each one into the spreadsheet — supplier, amount, VAT rate, category, matching it to a bank payment — that is roughly 75 minutes a month just for the data entry itself, before counting time spent hunting down a lost receipt or fixing a typo. At 30 or more documents a month, that time roughly doubles, and the risk of a mistake in a formula or a manually copied row grows along with the size of the sheet.
When Excel is enough, and when it is not
Excel is entirely sufficient if you are a non-VAT-registered self-employed person, you claim flat-rate expenses, or you are on the lump-sum tax (a flat monthly payment covering tax and both insurance contributions) and issue only a handful of documents a month. The administrative burden in that case is low, and a dedicated tool would be solving problems you do not actually have. As a rough rule of thumb: up to about 10 documents a month without VAT, Excel is usually faster than learning a new tool; from around 20 documents a month, the time spent on manual entry and checking for duplicates usually outweighs the time it would take to get set up in a dedicated app. For a broader look at keeping tax records online rather than in a spreadsheet, see our overview of online tax records for Czech self-employed people.
Conversely, it is worth switching to a dedicated invoicing and record-keeping tool if you are a VAT payer and have to generate a control statement, you process more than 20 documents a month, you invoice multiple clients with deposits, or you simply want the system to flag automatically who has not paid. It is also worth checking how the same records reconcile against actual bank activity — see our companion guide on connecting invoicing to your bank.
Moving off Excel without losing your history
Switching tools does not have to mean manually retyping your whole history. Old issued invoices can be uploaded as PDFs and have their data read automatically, rows from Excel can be exported to CSV and imported, and old receipts can simply be photographed one by one and read automatically. A realistic switch for a smaller self-employed person with roughly a hundred documents a year usually takes one to two afternoons — most of that time goes into scanning older paper receipts, not into setting up the tool itself. If you claim flat-rate expenses, our article on which documents to keep under flat-rate expenses covers exactly what still needs to be retained even though you are not deducting actual costs.
You can also keep Excel around as a backup even after switching — as long as you can always export your income-and-expense book in an open format. And if your income depends on when an invoice is actually paid rather than issued, our article on when a Czech sole trader taxes an invoice explains that timing in more detail.
How Taxorio handles this
Taxorio keeps your income-and-expense records running in the background of every invoice you issue and every expense you record — there is no separate spreadsheet to retype anything into. You just upload or photograph a document, and AI reads the supplier, amount, VAT rate, and date from it; you review the details and confirm them. Expenses are sorted into categories; for any category where you save a default business-use percentage in Settings (for example 80% for car costs or 50% for a phone bill), that percentage is pre-filled automatically on every new document, and you can adjust it for any individual document at any time — the category plays the same role as a "category" column in a hand-kept spreadsheet, just without the risk of a typo in the name. The overview also shows you directly which clients still have not paid.
You can download your income-and-expense book (a ZIP file containing two CSV files) on the Free plan at no cost — so even if you ever decide to go back to Excel, or hand your records to an accountant in an open format, the data stays available to you.