Difficulties in Electronic Accounting Archives Construction and Hot Q&A

In recent years, with the rapid improvement of enterprise informatization management and the state's active promotion of accounting digital transformation, more and more different types of electronic accounting materials are filling every link in enterprise operations.

How to efficiently and compliantly collect, manage, preserve, and utilize electronic accounting materials has become key for digital-intelligent enterprises advancing their finance digital-intelligent transformation. In 2021, the Archives Bureau Office, the Ministry of Finance General Office, the Ministry of Commerce General Office, and the State Taxation Administration General Office jointly issued the "Notice on Further Expanding the Pilot Work of Electronic Reimbursement, Posting, and Archiving of VAT Electronic Invoices", carrying out pilot promotion of electronic accounting archives nationwide. With advantages such as high efficiency and convenience, easy storage, easy querying, easy backup, easy sharing, and traceability, electronic accounting archives have been quickly accepted by enterprise operators and accounting practitioners.

Driven by policy support and attracted by the intuitively visible advantages of electronic accounting archives, more and more business operators are beginning to build electronic accounting archive applications, and the bottlenecks and difficulties in enterprise electronic accounting archive application construction are gradually emerging.

Archive compliance assurance

The legal attributes of electronic accounting archives require the implementing enterprise to possess strong professional management capabilities for electronic accounting archives, ensuring that the full lifecycle management of electronic accounting materials—from generation, collection, organization, preservation, utilization, to disposal—complies with the Archives Law of the People's Republic of China, the Electronic Accounting Archives Management Specifications, and other relevant laws and regulations, safeguarding the authenticity, integrity, usability, and security of electronic accounting archives.

Archive Filing Review

The core of electronic accounting archives construction is to comprehensively collect and preserve accounting materials with preservation value in the enterprise's business process. It requires the enterprise itself to have extremely strong internal control capabilities for business and financial management, and to complete a comprehensive review of internal financial processes and business processes in the early stage of application construction, clarifying business processes and related review elements, the scope of archiving, attachment requirements, business management specifications, and other content, ensuring the reasonable and comprehensive collection of electronic accounting materials.

Data standard execution

The construction of electronic accounting archives involves standardized and normalized processing of relevant accounting information on various enterprise information systems, such as: layout file generation, metadata collection, four-qualities testing, metadata, data interfaces, and other standards. It requires the electronic accounting archives application construction team to have extensive experience in electronic accounting archives construction and to be able to provide reasonable suggestions based on the enterprise's actual situation to ensure effective project implementation.

Information system integration

Electronic accounting archives data comes from different information systems. Electronic accounting archives construction requires integrated integration of the enterprise's involved information systems to achieve standardized processing, online circulation, and associated collection of all business documents for accounting materials, while ensuring data transmission security and ensuring that accounting materials are authentic and valid.

System and standard development

Electronic accounting archives are an emerging matter. In the process of application promotion, there are a series of related issues such as changes in archive content, changes in archiving processes, changes in management models, changes in job responsibilities, and changes in operating habits, requiring enterprises to establish a complete set of systems and specifications for constraints to ensure the security and compliance of electronic accounting archives. If system and specification construction is incomplete or implementation is not rigorous, it is easy to bring management risks to the reliability and integrity of archives.

Attached: Hot Q&A on electronic accounting archives

1. Do electronic accounting vouchers have legal effect compared to paper accounting vouchers?

Electronic accounting vouchers with legal and authentic sources have the same legal effect as paper accounting vouchers.

2. If a paper printout of an electronic accounting voucher is used as the basis for reimbursement, bookkeeping, and archiving, is it still necessary to retain the electronic accounting voucher?

Where an entity uses paper printouts of electronic accounting vouchers as the basis for reimbursement, bookkeeping, and archiving, it must simultaneously preserve the electronic accounting vouchers from which the paper copies were printed.

3. What is the retention period for electronic accounting archives?

The retention periods for accounting archives are divided into two categories: permanent and fixed-term. Fixed-term retention periods are generally divided into 10 years and 30 years. The retention period of accounting archives is counted from the first day after the end of the accounting year.

4. Can electronic accounting materials within the archiving scope be preserved as accounting archives in electronic form only?

An entity may use information technology means such as computers and network communications to manage accounting archives. Where the following conditions are simultaneously met, electronic accounting materials formed internally within the entity that fall within the archiving scope may be preserved only in electronic form, forming electronic accounting archives:

(1) The electronic accounting materials formed come from legitimate and valid sources and are formed and transmitted by computers and other electronic devices;

(2) The accounting system used can accurately, completely, and effectively receive and read electronic accounting materials, can output accounting materials such as accounting vouchers, accounting books, and financial accounting statements in archival formats conforming to national standards, and has set necessary review and approval procedures such as handling, review, and approval;

(3) The electronic archives management system used can effectively receive, manage, and utilize electronic accounting archives, meets the long-term preservation requirements for electronic archives, and has established retrieval relationships between electronic accounting archives and other related paper accounting archives;

(4) Take effective measures to prevent electronic accounting archives from being tampered with;

(5) Establish an electronic accounting archives backup system that can effectively prevent the impact of natural disasters, accidents, and human destruction;

(6) The electronic accounting materials formed do not belong to accounting archives with permanent preservation value or other important preservation value.

Meeting the above-stipulated conditions, where electronic accounting materials received externally by a unit bear an electronic signature compliant with the "Electronic Signature Law of the People's Republic of China", they may be archived and kept in electronic form only.，Form 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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