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.

Financial and Cash Register SAF-T

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.

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