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SAF-T: An Introduction to the International Standard

Understanding the flexible SAF-T international standards adopted by Austria, France, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal and Romania

SAF-T (Standard Audit File for Tax) is an international standard for the electronic reporting of accounting data from organisations to a national tax authority or external auditors used by tax administrations to gather granular data from businesses either on demand or periodically.

The SAF-T standard has been adopted in mostly European countries, alleviating the need for tax authorities to physically visit companies to extract and review wide-ranging corporate data.

This e-book includes:

  • What is SAF-T? – an exploration of the standard and its origins
  • A deeper dive of the SAF-T format – the current datasets and data requirements
  • The challenges of SAF-T for businesses – the flexibility and wider use of the standard
  • The future of SAF-T – what’s next?
  • How Sovos can help

Get the SAF-T international standards e-book

Countries that have introduced legislation to enforce SAF-T requirements include Austria, France, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Romania. SAF-T requirements are continuing to be adopted in a number of EU Member States and countries in other regions are actively considering introducing it.

The latest SAF-T standard includes accounting, accounts receivable, accounts payable, fixed assets and inventory datasets. In most cases authorities request a text file on an XML structure.

The SAF-T guideline is flexible, enabling governments to freely adapt SAF-T to suit their tax filing and audit systems, to perform audits, or as a basis for prefiling periodic tax declarations such as VAT returns or inventory statements.

This e-book discusses the introduction of SAF-T back in 2005 and how the standard has evolved since then, as well as the challenges of SAF-T for both businesses and governments.

How Sovos can help with SAF-T compliance

Sovos helps customers manage their SAF-T requirements across multiple jurisdictions through software solutions that automate the processes to seamlessly extract required data, map data accurately to SAF-T structures in the latest legal formats and perform deep analysis on the SAF-T output generated.

Sovos provides certainty with a future-proof strategy for tackling compliance obligations across all markets as VAT regulations evolve toward continuous e-reporting and other continuous transaction controls requiring increasingly granular data. Sovos’ solution for SAF-T combines extraction, analysis and generation providing our customers with the certainty they need.

Experience end-to-end handling with compliance peace of mind with Sovos.

Download the e-book