Norway SAF-T

Mandatory SAF-T reporting was introduced for businesses from 1 January 2020. It is only required on an on-demand basis by the tax authorities, typically immediately before a tax audit.

It has been in operation on a voluntary basis since 2017. Businesses below NOK5 million, and not storing their data electronically, are exempted from the mandatory requirement.

Norwegian SAF-T is standard file format for exporting various types of accounting transactional data using the XML format.

The first version of the SAF-T Financial is limited to the general ledger level including customer and supplier transactions. Necessary master data is also included. Future versions of the SAF-T Financial will include source documents such as detailed invoice data and movements of goods and asset transactions. Furthermore, other data elements will be added to support SAF-T Financial as a format for migration of data between different accounting software.

The SAF-T Cash Register containing journal data from electronic cash register systems was finalized in 2016.

The primary purpose of the SAF-T Financial data format is to:

• Serve as an export format for accounting data after request from the Norwegian Tax Administration, public accountants and other parties.
• Serve as archiving format for the necessary accounting data for those who are obliged to keep accounts as stated in the Norwegian bookkeeping legislation.
• Serve as a format for moving data when changing accounting software.
• Serve as a format for moving data from accounting software to other financial systems such as year-end closing systems, tax computation systems, business intelligence software, advisory systems etc.