Accountants must keep their advertising for 36 months
The CPA Code of Ethics requires chartered professional accountants to keep a full copy of every advertisement, in its original form, for 36 months from its last broadcast or publication. Almost no firm does it.
The obligation appears in section 74 of the Code. It also provides that the copy be handed over on request to the syndic, the professional inspection committee or an inspector.
Applied to a digital campaign, the requirement changes scale and becomes a real cost item. Forty active ad variants per month add up to 480 pieces over a year, not counting landing pages, the pages where a client who clicks an ad ends up, newsletters and social posts. Each one must exist somewhere, in its original form, for three years.
Left without a process, the obligation becomes impossible to meet, and the cost of catching up exceeds the cost of the campaign itself. Framed properly, it costs a few minutes a month and no longer carries any risk.
The minimal process
One dated folder per month, holding a capture and the full text of each variant, the broadcast period and the platform used. Nothing more.
The process costs little: fifteen minutes a month, three hours a year. Rebuilding three years of campaigns after the fact, when it is still possible, takes dozens of hours and never fully succeeds, for lack of access to platforms closed in the meantime.
In the contract with your vendor, decide who produces this archive, in what format, where it is stored and what happens to it when the relationship ends. A firm that never asked the question will discover, when its agency leaves, that three years of pieces stayed behind with the agency, and it will bear the risk alone.
Three things to verify
- Where are your current advertisements archived, in what form, and since when?
- Who produces the archive, you or your vendor, and is it written into the mandate?
- What happens to the folder if the relationship with the vendor ends?
Putting this process in place and writing it into the mandate is part of what we cover in a paid audit.
This obligation applies to chartered professional accountants. Other professional orders regulate retention differently, and several do not impose it. Check your own code rather than assuming, in either direction.
Building the budget that carries these decisions is detailed in the marketing plan and its budget.
The full framework for advertising by professionals governed by an order is in our article on ethical compliance in advertising.
- Code of Ethics of Chartered Professional Accountants, CQLR c C-48.1, r 6, section 74, consolidated text accessed July 2026.
Gabriel almost always takes your first call and carries out your audit. He builds the strategy starting from your growth goal: where to put your budget, which market to test and how to connect each lead to a real sale in your CRM. He mainly leads engagements for three goals: Optimize the profitability of your digital campaigns, Develop a new market, and Generate demand and growth. With Geneviève, he also works on organic search (SEO), AI visibility (GEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO). The sales a Google Ads or Meta Ads campaign brings in depend on the page that receives the click. He writes mainly about marketing strategy, paid advertising and measurement.
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