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Standard audit files - tax

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Starting in January, 2020, companies in Norway must report financial data and provide a set of Standard Audit Files - Tax (SAF-T) to the Norwegian authorities upon request. This extension makes it easy to set up, generate, and export Standard Audit Files - Tax in Business Central. The exported SAF-T files will automatically be compressed as a .zip file ready to be uploaded by the user on the website of Skatteetaten, the Norwegian tax authorities.

What does this extension handle?

This extension provides the following capabilities:

  • Setup and mapping of chart of accounts to SAF-T standard accounts.
  • Mapping VAT setup to SAF-T VAT codes.
  • Control to which extent dimensions are exported in SAF-T files.
  • Export SAF-T files, either directly or by using the Job Queue. Using Job Queue lets you schedule the export to occur during quiet hours, which is useful for potentially large datasets.

Setup of the Norwegian SAF-T extension

Set up the SAF-T extension through Assisted Setup, which provides an easy, step-by-step guide for get started with SAF-T in Business Central. If needed, you can run the guide several times until you finish the setup.

  1. In Business Central, choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter Assisted Setup, and then choose Assisted Setup.

  2. Choose Set up SAF-T.

  3. The first page in the setup guide explains what you are about to set up. Choose Next.

  4. In the in Mapping Type field, choose the type of Chart of Accounts you want to SAF-T accounts, and then choose Next.

    Note

    If you are using the on-premises version of Business Central, there are some additional steps.

    1. Download and import source files with SAF-T accounts. Download the SAF-T mapping files from Skatteetaten's repo on Github.
    2. Choose Import The Source Files For Mapping.
    3. Import all required files. If you are setting up the mapping for income statement import files, make sure to import mapping codes for all records with Income Statement in the Source Type column.
    4. For each imported file, choose Update mapping codes from file.

  5. To define the period for the first SAF-T reporting, choose Accounting Period, confirm the data range, and then choose Next.

    Typically, this is done for a specific accounting period, but you can also define a date range without specifying an accounting period.

  6. To map your chart of accounts to the SAF-T accounts, choose Open setup to define G/L account mappings. Lines where the G/L Account No. is marked with green indicates that here are transactions on the account within the date range specified in the previous step, in which case it must be mapped. Other G/L accounts can be skipped. When finished, close the SAF-T Mapping Setup Card, and then choose Next in the setup guide.

  7. To map the VAT Posting Setup to standard sales and purchase SAF-T tax codes, choose Open setup to define VAT Posting Setup Mapping. When finished close the SAF-T VAT Posting Setup card, and then choose Next in the setup guide.

  8. Norwegian authorities recommend that you export dimensions for financial transactions. However, in some situations you may not want to export dimensions - for example if you have internal dimensions that do provide value to auditors. This step lets you open the Dimensions list and choose which dimensions to export. Choose the value in the Export to SAF-T field, and then choose Close.

  9. To specify the employee who is the SAF-T contact in your company, choose the employee in the Employee No. field. This is useful when Norwegian authorities have questions about the SAF-T files. When finished, choose Next.

  10. The setup of SAF-T is now finished. Choose Finish.

Note

The mappings are tied to the date range you specified. You can create additional mappings for other periods without changing the mapping you already created. You can also copy mappings from previously made setups. This is to ensure that you can report SAF-T for different periods while managing changes in your chart of accounts.

Exporting SAF-T files

To export SAF-T files from Business Central, you must first create and set up a SAF-T Export to define the mapping range. For example, you can define a mapping and export the entire year of 2019, and another mapping for just the month of April 2019 if the authorities ask you to provide this data specifically.

To create an export of SAF-T files

  1. In Business Central, choose the Lightbulb that opens the Tell Me feature. icon, enter SAF-T Exports, and then choose SAF-T Exports.
  2. On the SAF-T Exports page, choose Create.
  3. On the SAF-T Export page, in the Mapping Range Code field, choose the mapping range for which to define an export.
  4. To start the SAF-T export, do one of the following:
    • To export immediately, choose Start.
    • To schedule the export to be handled by the jobs in the Job Queue, choose Parallel Processing. Exporting G/L entries can take time. To speed up the process, consider specifying how many jobs to run in parallel.
  5. To check the status of the SAF-T file generation, look at the Lines section in the lower part of this page.
  6. When all files are generated, choose Download file to download a .zip file that contains the SAF-T files. This file is ready to be uploaded to Skatteetaten.

SAF-T files and data quality

You can configure Business Central with extra data quality validation controls that help make sure that your SAF-T files can be validated by Skatteetaten. For example, SAF-T files can only be validated when certain information exists on relevant records in Business Central. To help ensure data quality for SAF-T you can enable more proactive controls on the Data Quality FastTab on the SAF-T Setup page. Additionally, on the SAF-T Export card page, use the Data check action to check the data quality before you export the file.

Note

SAF-T exports will by default generate one file with master data, and separate files for each of the months included in the selected mapping range. Consider the amount of transactions in the selected period and adjust the Max No. of Jobs accordingly on the SAF-T Export page. As a general recommendation, start with three parallel jobs to allow parallel export and still leave resources for other Business Central users. Additionally, for on-premises, you can specify a network share in the Folder path to generate the SAF-T files directly on a network share instead of using the database. For online versions of Business Central this is always the case. If you specify the Folder Name, the generated .zip file will be located here.

Important

Due to the nature of exporting transactions, exporting SAF-T files will impact performance of Business Central.

There are a couple of things you can do to improve performance:

  • Split by Date option

    This approach collects general ledger entries by date, not by month as is the default with better performance as a result.

  • XML option

    For Business Central on-premises, you have an option to not generate .ZIP files from the export. This will export the raw XML files and is only possible where there is a Folder Path to export to. The user can then compress the files manually, which saves server performance. SAF-T files can be large and compressing them to a .ZIP file is a costly operation for the server.

  • Create Multiple Zip Files option

Finally, for both online and on-premises, for very large exports with many transactions, you can also use the option to create multiple .ZIP files. This is useful if individual files per month are very large, or the count of files per date is too big. Use this option when the single large ZIP file will not validate on the authorities' web site due to its size, for example. Using this feature will split up the export into multiple ZIP files, up to 10 in alignment with the requirements that are stated in the general SAF-T documentation. The SAF-T Export File page is always opened when using the Download File action. Here you can see how many files were generated and download them one by one.

See also

Customizing Business Central Using Extensions
Getting Ready for Doing Business

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