90% of medium-sized companies are not prepared for SAF-T reporting to ANAF

Next year, more than 20,000 medium-sized taxpayers must submit Declaration 406 (SAF-T – Standard Audit File for Tax), but 90% of them are not yet ready to transfer the necessary data to ANAF, although it is mandatory from January 1^st, 2023, according to NextUp Solutions, one of the largest software solutions companies for business. Thus, chaos will be generated in the entrepreneurial environment, the activity of companies being burdened with an important additional task. Companies that will not submit Declaration 406 on time will certainly receive fines, warns Roxana Epure, Managing Partner of NextUp Solutions.

After in 2022 the SAF-T reporting became mandatory for large taxpayers, from next year it must be submitted to ANAF by medium-sized companies. As more than 390 fiscal and accounting elements are required to be completed, SAF-T is considered a complex and dense reporting by the specialists in the field. This reporting must include information about the entire activity of the company including name, VAT identification number, fiscal domicile and financial-accounting details – ledger accounts, customers, suppliers, taxes, stocks, owners, sales invoices, purchase invoices, payments, movements of goods, transactions of assets.

“Everything that happens in a company must be reported to the financial institutions, which is an enormous job that directly involves the owners of the company, being also a very complex task for the financial department staff . And, in this context, as an entrepreneur in contact with more than 5,000 medium-sized companies, I can confirm that there is a huge number of companies that are not yet ready for this bushy reporting. They lack the qualified human resources and technical and digital solutions needed to gather and correlate all the information for a complete reporting, without errors and without delays, to the state institutions”, points out Roxana Epure, Managing Partner of NextUp Solutions.

Thus, NextUp notes that there will be major delays in filing the Declaration 406 (SAF-T), up to 4-6 weeks past the February 28, 2023 deadline. In order to be able to report SAF-T by this date, companies should already have the necessary resources, such as a software solution to gather all information automatically and generate the XML file to report it to ANAF, and in addition a good part of the information correlation work already completed.

“Those who believe that will overcome all obstacles related to the implementation of Declaration 406 in a few days are dramatically mistaken. Postponing the necessary steps to comply with this new regulation only prepares the ground for dark and gloomy days at the beginning of 2023”, emphasizes Roxana Epure, Managing Partner of NextUp Solutions.

NextUp Solutions is among the few software companies that offer the automated SAF-T reporting solution, companies in the field shy away from implementing this standard audit file for tax, due to the cumbersome documentation received from ANAF, the lack of specialized staff and a consistent investment.

“To implement SAF-T solution in an ERP software means tilting at windmills. We managed to control them in the right direction, metaphorically speaking, correctly interpreting and integrating the documentation received from ANAF regarding the development of the necessary tools for filling out SAF-T declaration automatically. It’s a task that other similar firms have shied away from as too much of a hassle, and therefore, according to a recent market analysis we’ve done, we’re among the few firms that make SAF-T reporting solution available to taxpayers. We, at NextUp Solutions, as a provider of accounting and management software, implement most of changes or innovations brought by the Romanian government and we felt obliged to the business environment to develop an automated solution for SAF-T reporting. To do this we have invested over 120,000 euros in technology and human resources from October 2021 until now, making the solution available to large companies and now to medium-sized ones”, explains Roxana Epure, NextUp Managing Partner.

The preparing process of companies for the first reporting is the most sophisticated and resource-consuming process. By investing in automation, NextUp Solutions reduced the execution time of this process from a few days to a few minutes, the information required by the state on the transactions specific to the companies being now automatically allocated. In addition, with the help of a stable and secure solution, the monthly data collection is done automatically with just a few clicks, by a single employee.

Otherwise, in the absence of an automated solution, SAF-T reporting in medium-sized companies can be done manually in 4-5 days instead of a few minutes, and only if at least 2-3 employees work at the same time, of which at least one is an Accounting expert. But with manual work, the chances of getting a correct result are zero, the error rate is very high, according to NextUp Solutions.

In 2022, SAF-T solution, mandatory for large taxpayers, has been implemented in over 400 companies from various fields in Romania and in over 1,000 accounting firms that will report for their clients.