How Athleit retains payment records

Why records retention matters

Tax authorities generally require businesses to keep financial records for several years: HMRC typically expects 6 years from the end of your accounting period, and the IRS typically expects around 7 years. Your own situation can differ — check with your accountant or look up the rules for your jurisdiction. Athleit's job is to make sure your payment data survives normal roster and organization changes so you can meet whatever obligations apply to you.

What's retained on every payment record

For every team payment event and club payment event recipient, Athleit keeps:

• Amount charged and currency.
• Installment plan configuration and progress (plan count, installments completed, amount paid to date).
• Status timeline — pending, partial, paid, void — with the timestamps of status changes.
• Payment method and the Stripe checkout session / charge records that moved the money.
• Player name snapshot — the player's display name at the moment the payment was created. Captured again by a database safeguard if the player is later deleted, so it doesn't vanish.
• Team name snapshot — for club payment events, the team the player was on when they enrolled. For team payment events, the team that owned the event.
• Club name snapshot — on events that belong to (or were owned by a team under) a club.
• Event title and the line items that made up the total.

Name snapshots are the minimum identifying information needed to attribute a payment to a person and team for audit purposes.

What survives each deletion path

| You delete | Payment records survive? | What you keep on the record | | --- | --- | --- | | Player (roster or household) | Yes | Player name snapshot; team name snapshot; event details | | Remove from a team's roster (per-team, household intact) | Yes | Recipient row kept; player remains in the household and on any other linked team; payments on this team's events still attributed to the snapshotted name | | Team | Yes | Team name snapshot; club link preserved; all line items, installments, charges | | Club | Yes at the database level | Club name snapshot on each payment event | | Household / family | Yes | Recipient row kept; family link is cleared but player name snapshot, team name snapshot, and all amounts/installments/charges remain |

For every deletion path, the parent relationship is loosened rather than severed on delete, so the payment rows stay, and the names you need for reporting are preserved on each row.

Who can see historical records

• Team staff see their team's payment history through the normal payment event views as long as the team exists.
• Club admins and staff retain read-access to payment history for teams that were under their club, even after the team is deleted. Historical events show up attributed to the snapshotted team name.
• Once a club itself is deleted, records are retained at the database level but are no longer reachable through the normal in-app views — retrieval happens through Athleit support.

What Athleit does not do automatically

• No auto-purge. Athleit does not delete payment records on a schedule. Records are retained indefinitely at the database level.
• No legal advice. Required retention periods depend on your business, your jurisdiction, and the type of record. Confirm with your accountant or legal counsel.
• No automatic export of archives. If you need a bulk export of historical records (for example, for an accountant or an auditor), contact Athleit support.

GDPR and the right to erasure

Retaining financial records for tax and accounting purposes is a recognised lawful basis for keeping personal data under GDPR Article 6(1)(c) (legal obligation). Name snapshots on payment rows are the minimum identifying information needed to make a record useful for reconciliation and audit.

If someone asks you to erase their personal data and they have payment records in Athleit, contact support — specific erasure requests that conflict with retention obligations need to be handled case-by-case, not by deleting their household.

Practical guidance for staff

• Prefer "remove from roster" over deleting a household. With the universal household model, remove from roster affects only that team's roster row; the household, the player's other team rosters, and any pending payments on those teams are unaffected. Payment records survive either way, and roster removal keeps the household context (adults, linked teams, invite codes) intact for anyone still active.
• Think twice before deleting a team. Payment history survives, but ongoing workflows (sending new events, marking pending ones paid) do not. Only delete a team once the season is fully closed out.
• Don't delete a club while it still has active teams. As with teams, historical records are preserved but live workflows stop.

Related

• Club payments and payment events
• Billing and Stripe
• Households and invites