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As the digital economy develops, key policies in the field of accounting archives continue to advance. The State Taxation Administration's VAT invoice electronic reform, the Ministry of Finance's electronic receipt pilot, and the General Administration of Customs' pilot for electronic customs special payment certificates are all being actively promoted. Full-process electronic and information-based electronic accounting archives are the general trend of the future, and China's accounting archive management is gradually developing toward digitalization.

Summary of Electronic Accounting Archives Policies

On January 1, 2016, the Measures for the Management of Accounting Archives came into effect. The Measures were jointly issued by the Ministry of Finance and the National Archives Administration. Article 8 provides that electronic accounting materials formed within a unit that meet specific conditions and fall within the archiving scope may be preserved only in electronic form, forming electronic accounting archives.

On March 23, 2020, the "Notice on Issues Related to the Reimbursement, Booking, and Archiving of Electronic Accounting Vouchers" was issued, which explicitly stipulates that electronic accounting vouchers have the same legal effect as paper accounting vouchers.

On July 1, 2022, the "Specification for Electronic Accounting Archives Management" came into effect, stipulating content such as the formation, collection, organization, and archiving of electronic accounting materials and the custody, statistics, utilization, appraisal, and disposal of electronic accounting archives.

On May 15, 2023, the "Notice on Jointly Carrying Out the Deepening Pilot of Accounting Data Standards for Electronic Vouchers" researched and formulated and released the "Accounting Data Standards for Electronic Vouchers," adding pilot types of electronic vouchers, expanding the scope of pilot units at the issuance and receiving ends, and further clarifying the preservation method for the reimbursement and archiving of fully digitalized e-invoices. It further opened up the "last mile" of reimbursement, booking, and archiving of electronic vouchers.

What are electronic accounting archives

The "Management Standards for Electronic Accounting Archives" points out that electronic accounting archives are electronic accounting materials directly formed or received, transmitted, stored, and archived by electronic computers in accounting work, recording and reflecting a unit's economic business matters, and possessing voucher, reference, and preservation value.

The following materials all belong to electronic accounting archives:

（1）Electronic vouchers, including source vouchers and bookkeeping vouchers;

（2）Electronic ledgers, including general ledger, subsidiary ledger, journal, fixed asset cards, and other auxiliary ledgers;

（3）Electronic reports, including monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual financial accounting reports;

（4）Other electronic accounting materials, including bank deposit balance reconciliation statements, bank statements, tax filing forms, accounting archive transfer lists, accounting archive custody lists, accounting archive destruction lists, accounting archive appraisal opinions, and other accounting materials with preservation value.

Advantages of electronic accounting archives

1. Improve accounting work efficiency: electronic accounting archives can enable automated processing and reduce manual operations. Automatically generating, reviewing, and submitting accounting statements through computer systems can greatly shorten the preparation cycle of accounting statements and improve enterprise decision-making efficiency.

2. Reduce enterprise costs: Electronic accounting archives can reduce the storage and management costs of paper archives, save office space, and lower enterprise operating costs. At the same time, electronic accounting archives can achieve remote access and sharing, facilitating internal and external information exchange and reducing communication costs.

3. Improve the quality of accounting information: electronic accounting archives can achieve real-time updates and queries, ensuring the accuracy and timeliness of accounting information. Through the automatic verification and audit functions of the computer system, human errors and fraudulent behavior can be effectively prevented, improving the quality of accounting information.

4. Promote enterprise informatization management: electronic accounting archives are an important part of enterprise informatization construction and help drive enterprises to achieve comprehensive informatization management. Through integration with other business systems, automatic import and export of financial data can be achieved, improving the level of enterprise informatization management.

5. Strengthen internal control: electronic accounting archives enable real-time monitoring and analysis of accounting data, helping strengthen enterprise internal control. Through real-time tracking and analysis of accounting data, potential risks and problems can be identified, corrective measures can be taken promptly, and business risks can be reduced.

6. Meets environmental protection requirements: electronic accounting archives can reduce the use of paper archives, which is conducive to environmental protection.

How can enterprises realize electronic accounting archives

Enterprises need to establish complete archive management processes and systems, including the collection, creation, storage, and query of electronic accounting archives. They also need advanced technical means such as cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence to improve the efficiency and quality of collecting, storing, processing, and querying electronic accounting archives.

Specifically, the implementation steps of electronic accounting archives include:

1. Establish an electronic accounting archives system: enterprises need to establish a complete electronic accounting archives system that can connect with business systems such as financial software, reimbursement systems, and tax systems to achieve automatic data acquisition and archiving.

2. Data collection: Through interfaces or other methods, collect the data that needs to be archived into the electronic accounting archives system.

3. Data organization: organize and shelve the files that need to be archived according to archiving rules, ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the data.

4. Data storage: store archive materials in the system and adopt advanced data storage technologies such as cloud storage and distributed storage to improve data reliability and security.

5. Data utilization: through query and retrieval functions, facilitate internal and external use and enable data sharing and exchange.

In addition, to ensure the authenticity and integrity of electronic accounting archives, enterprises also need to take measures such as introducing digital signature technology and encryption technology to ensure that electronic accounting archives are not tampered with or forged during transmission and storage. At the same time, for some important electronic accounting archives, enterprises can also use paper backups or electronic backups for storage to ensure the security and reliability of the archives.

Obviously, enterprises need certain technical capabilities to implement electronic accounting archives. There are currently many third-party electronic accounting archive service providers, such asKailing Technology's Electronic Accounting Archives SystemIt can help enterprises achieve various capabilities of electronic accounting archives, and is a cloud service product built strictly in accordance with the latest regulations of the Ministry of Finance and the Archives Bureau on electronic archiving management, which can meet most of the needs of enterprises.

With the continuous advancement of the "Standards for Electronic Accounting Archive Management," electronic accounting archive management will be imperative in the coming years. Therefore, enterprises need to build a full-lifecycle blueprint for electronic accounting archive management and fully utilize accounting information system data to achieve automatic classified archiving of electronic accounting archives.

Source: internet

Beijing Kailing Technology Co., Ltd.——an enterprise business-finance-tax digitalization solution service provider.

Kailing Technology provides solutions for sales management systems, procurement management systems, output invoicing systems, input invoice collection systems, imaging management systems, financial posting systems, electronic accounting archives, fully digitalized e-invoice and Leqi interfaces and other businesses according to enterprise needs, professionally and efficiently helping enterprises transform and upgrade their business-finance-tax digital management.

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