Germany’s GoBD (“Principles for the proper management and storage of books, records and documents in electronic form, as well as data access”) set out requirements governing the accounting and storage of fiscally significant electronic data and paper documents with reference to the country’s generally accepted accounting principles (GoB).

This means that in Germany, Companies are legally required to export data for all transactions and master data from a fiscal year, and to provide this data to auditors within a reasonable time. The data must be collected in a specific file format, so that it can be imported to the auditor’s audit environment. This procedure is controlled by tax authorities: data that must be exported depend on the audit requirements. For example, a typical set of exported data includes master data and transaction tables such as Main accounts, Ledger, Tax codes, Customer, Vendor and Item master data, transactions, Fixed assets and so on.

What does this mean in terms of audit compliance?

Simply put, a technical solution (the ERP software product) must be designed to comply with the requirements of a tax audit. In cases like these, specific characteristics of the solution suddenly become extremely relevant: that’s why in the latest version of Mago4’s Financial Area, under the Germany localization, a specific functionality named GoBD-Export has been implemented.  With this new procedure, Mago4 exports the accounting transactions of a given period, in addition to the master data of customers, suppliers, chart of accounts and tax codes.

The GoBD Export procedure will allow the user to export data set of the Accounting tables (Accounting entries and related master data), generating .csv files complete with an index.xml, which the auditor can import and process independently. The GoBD Export procedure will be present in Services | Financial | Accounting Procedures menu.

To know more about the functionalities, please visit the Mago4 Help Center, where task guides are available to show GoBD - specific configurations, manage table group for export, and perform the export.