FEC France Legal Requirement with Data Retention Tool (DaRT)

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Business Requirement

From 1st January 2014, companies in France are legally required to export their accounting transaction data for a fiscal year. They must then provide that data to auditors in Fichier des écritures comptables (FEC) format within a reasonable amount of time. Upon receiving notice of a tax audit, a company has 15 days to prepare and remit the FEC file. This ‘FEC’ file is described by article L. 47 A-I of the Tax Procedure Code (Livres des Procédures Fiscales) with 18 fields to be filled in for each accounting entry.

Solution :

SAP Data Retention Tool (DART) functionality can be used in order to fulfill legal requirement of the Article A.47 A-1. DART helps SAP users to comply with legal requirements for data retention and data transfer for tax audits. You can use DART to periodically extract and store tax-relevant data from SAP applications. DART extracts the data into sequential files and provides tools for you to view and analyse the stored data.

Broad guidelines to configure DART view to generate FEC file following France Legal Requirement are illustrated below: 

1. Defining data extract views : New data view 2FR_FI01 must be created.

• Go to transaction FTWY and Specify ‘Data view’ name as 2FR_FI01 and click on ‘Create’.

• Specify description of the data view and click on ‘Data segments’.

• Specify data segments and complete field mapping as shown above. Then Click on ‘View fields’ button and select fields that are specified in the Article A.47 A-1.

•  Following Article A.47 A-1 only 18 mandatory fields to be filled in for each accounting entry. As the "debit" and "credit" information is not present in SAP system, information 12 and 13 can be replaced by "Amount" and "Credit/Debit indicator" respectively, as follows:

• Click on ‘Save’ to save the data view 2FR_FI01.

Conclusion

SAP Data Retention Tool (DART) makes it possible to extract and store data (typically finance and tax related) so that it can be used by auditors or tax authorities at a later point in time. It helps in achieving legal requirements of many countries without additional development efforts. There can be a good amount of saving as there is no need to develop additional custom reports or queries. The functionality can be implemented by functional resources with the support from Basis team (for implementing required SAP Notes.)