Policy Interpretation｜Understanding the Key Revisions of the Accounting Informatization Work Standards in One Article

In recent years, with the development of digital technology, emerging technologies represented by mobile Internet, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and blockchain have driven more significant changes in the accounting informatization work of unit finance departments. With the release of the new Accounting Law, the Ministry of Finance revised and issued the Specifications for Accounting Informatization Work (Cai Kuai [2024] No. 11, hereinafter referred to as the Specifications).

The revised Work Standards consist of six chapters and 50 articles, divided into General Provisions, Accounting Informatization Construction, Accounting Data Processing and Application, Accounting Informatization Security, Accounting Informatization Supervision, and Supplementary Provisions. It clarifies the scope of application, organizational safeguards, construction content, and specific requirements for data processing of accounting informatization, strengthens accounting informatization security and supervision requirements, and provides specific guidance for units to carry out accounting informatization work.

Ministry of Finance of the People's Republic of China: Notice on Issuing the Work Specifications for Accounting Informatization

01Interpretation of key revisions

1. Expanded the scope of application

Expand the scope of application from enterprises to state organs, social organizations, companies, enterprises, public institutions, and other organizations (hereinafter collectively referred to as units), achieving comprehensive coverage of accounting informatization work for all types of units.

According to the requirements of the Work Specifications, public institutions and other non-enterprise organizations need to implement accounting informatization work requirements to serve the organization's high-quality development.

2. The system standardizes the content of unit accounting informatization construction

Standardize construction content in terms of clarifying construction goals and resource investment, formulating overall planning and construction direction, building management mechanisms and standards systems, and building information systems and realizing internal and external system interoperability, systematically guiding units in carrying out accounting informatization construction. The specific regulatory requirements for units' accounting informatization construction mainly include the following five points:

First,Accounting informatization requires good top-level design and overall planning, to ensure that the system content modules are reasonable and that internal and external systems are organically integrated and interconnected. The planning of accounting information systems needs to match the unit's industry characteristics, development strategy, management model, etc., support the optimization and innovation of organizational structure and business processes, and while collecting data for accounting and financial management, gradually promote the realization of financial management informatization and decision support informatization from the business domain level, promote the realization of digitalization and intelligence of accounting work from the technical application level, and establish and improve an accounting informatization work system that adapts to the requirements of digital economy development.

Second,Strengthen accounting standardization construction, consolidate the foundation of accounting informatization. Accounting informatization needs to combine the unit's actual business scenarios and management needs, formulate a unified set of business standards including accounting subject system, financial master data, accounting processes, and accounting statements, and establish and improve internal technical standards and data standards systems to eliminate data silos and promote data utilization. Accounting data standards need to cover all links of the accounting information system such as input, processing, and output. By implementing standardization requirements for electronic vouchers, accounting processing, and statement preparation, a relatively complete accounting data standard system is formed, with unified application and coordinated management, thereby increasing the sharing and application of accounting data and tapping the value of accounting data in accounting information quality supervision and assisting unit economic decision-making. For enterprise groups to strengthen unified control over subordinate units, accounting standardization construction is particularly important.

Third,Accounting information systems should realize the automation of business processes and rules, the results automatically executed by the system should be queryable, verifiable, and traceable. At the same time, in accordance with the requirements of the internal control standard system, enterprise internal control processes and control rules, such as accounting personnel job responsibility division, accounting treatment approval procedures, authorization, and review, should be embedded into the accounting information system, and automatic prevention, monitoring, and early warning of violations of control requirements should be achieved.

Fourth,Accounting information systems should interconnect with internal and external systems.On one hand, accounting information systems should support business processing directly driving accounting processing, improving the consistency of business data and accounting data through business-finance integration, and enabling internal data resource sharing and analysis. On the other hand, an entity's accounting information system should interconnect with the information systems of external parties such as finance, tax, banks, suppliers, and customers, including bank transaction and data integration, electronic tax invoice information integration, and customer-supplier transaction collaboration and reconciliation, to achieve centralized automatic processing of external transaction information, enhance the entity's risk prevention capabilities, and improve financial management.

Fifth,Accounting information systems need to fully utilize digital technologyFor example, low-code, OCR, RPA, AI, large models, etc., integrated with management concepts such as intelligent accounting, financial sharing, and enterprise performance management, to achieve cross-integration of accounting information systems with various fields and industries, apply automation tools such as financial robots, and promote theIntensive, automated, intelligent, effectively improving financial management efficiency.

3.Clarified accounting data processing requirements。Clarified the legal effect of electronic accounting materials

Require that the unit's accounting information system should adapt to the accounting data standards for electronic vouchers, and at the same time stipulate that electronic accounting materials with reliable sources, standardized procedures, and compliant elements have the same legal effect as paper accounting materials.

Through data collection and processing, accounting information systems complete the landing of data in information systems. Combined with the unit's data application scenarios, they use technology for data governance to form scalable, aggregatable, and comparable accounting data elements, and circulate and use data elements under the premise of security and compliance, forming tradable and usable socialized data, fully realizing the value of accounting data elements and serving value creation.

For accounting vouchers such as fully digitalized e-invoices, railway electronic passenger tickets, and bank electronic receipts, accounting information systems should automatically collect and receive accounting data such as electronic original vouchers through safe and convenient channels, adapt to electronic voucher accounting data standards, and perform legality, authenticity, and uniqueness verification. Technologies such as OCR should be applied to automatically parse electronic accounting vouchers and generate structured data files for account entry that meet standards.

Electronic accounting vouchers serve as the basis for financial reimbursement and accounting, realizing paperless financial processing and being an effective measure for the finance department to practice ESG. The Work Specifications recognize the validity of electronic accounting vouchers at the institutional level, effectively solving key and difficult issues of high social concern and broad impact, such as inconsistent standards for various electronic vouchers and difficulty in receiving, parsing, and booking them, truly realizing "let data run more and let the people run less," reducing social governance costs and social resource consumption, and helping promote high-quality economic and social development.

4. Strengthened accounting informatization security

Comprehensively require units to consider system security, network security, confidentiality security, cross-border security, and other aspects of accounting informatization, and strengthen security risk prevention for accounting data in generation, transmission, storage, and other stages.

Accounting information systems should strengthen information security construction and adopt necessary measures such as network firewalls, data transmission encryption, data storage encryption, and data access permission control to ensure the data security of accounting information systems. At the same time, establish a classified and graded management system for accounting data security, strengthen the protection of important data and core data, for example, undisclosed financial statements may only be read by personnel in relevant positions within the unit's internal network environment. On the other hand, necessary backup measures need to be taken to ensure the integrity and availability of accounting materials.

For situations where a unit establishes branches overseas and its data servers are deployed overseas, it should prevent relevant domestic and overseas institutions and individuals from obtaining and transmitting accounting data overseas through illegal, irregular and improper means, and require that backups of electronic accounting materials be kept domestically, so as to support the unit's accounting work when necessary and meet the needs of financial and accounting supervision.

5. Strengthened accounting informatization supervision

Clarified the supervision content including the finance department's supervision and inspection of units carrying out accounting informatization work and accounting software service providers providing accounting software and related services, penalties for non-compliance with regulatory requirements, and accountability for illegal acts by finance departments and their staff.

Accounting informatization supervision is an important part of improving the quality of accounting information and ensuring the smooth progress of enterprise economic management activities. It mainly refers to supervising the process and results of accounting processing, including supervision of the compliance and security of accounting informatization systems and the accuracy and completeness of data processing, so as to ensure the authenticity, accuracy, and completeness of accounting information. Accounting informatization should incorporate the content of accounting informatization supervision and implement the management department's requirements for accounting information systems. For those using accounting software provided by accounting software service providers, the qualification requirements for accounting software service providers should be implemented.

02Significance

This revision of the Work Specifications is an important measure to implement the new Accounting Law, marking that China's accounting informatization work has entered a new stage, and is also an inevitable requirement for accelerating the digital transformation of accounting work. It will help standardize accounting work in the digital economy environment, promote the healthy development of accounting informatization, improve accounting information quality, and give play to the role of accounting data. It is an objective requirement for serving high-quality economic and social development.

Source: internet

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