In Sweden there is a legal requirement that once a verification (receipt or payment etc) it can not be change after it has been registered. If something was incorrect a journal entry needs to be done.
I know that in manager I can lock from before a date so I can’t change any verifications. However since I can unlock it at anytime it is not following the legal requirements.
Is there a way today to set this so I can’t change verifications once it has been registered?
If not can you please add it as a feature request since manager can not legally be used for accounting in Sweden due to that verifications can be changed after registration.
I am reluctant to do that. The developer has previously expressed some opposition to this idea on the grounds that many users are relatively unskilled in accounting. Records could easily become useless without the ability to correct mistakes.
Can you provide a link to documentation of this legal requirement? It would be helpful to know exactly what it says.
I’m not sure why they did this in Sweden. Your not allowed to use an excel sheet for accounting in Sweden for this reason that you can edit and delete after creation.
And yes it will create a extra job for people that are beginners and are not so skilled in accounting…
Lasting way
Accounting must be done in a lasting way.The duration requirement must be fulfilled at the latest when a business event is to be booked (see further below about the timing of accounting). If an accounting officer has chosen to postpone the accounting, the timing of the duration requirement will also be moved accordingly. The duration requirement means that what has been posted must not be erased or otherwise made illegible. It is only when this is met that a business event is considered posted.A business event that is recorded in, for example, Excel is not considered posted because it is not permanent. The same applies to so-called preliminary accounting in an accounting program. The business event is not considered to be posted until the accounting officer has “locked” the period.
The business events must be posted so that they can be presented in registration order (basic accounting) and systematic order (main accounting).
Yes you can lock it manually. The requirements is that the verifications can not be edited or deleted once created and saved. If the lock is removed the verifications can be deleted and edited it will not meet the requirement…in Sweden. In countries that don’t have that requirement it will work.
In Sweden not even the “Accounting officer” can delete or edit an verification as I understand it. When a year/month is done it is being locked so no new entries can be made. Similar to the lock function in Manager.
A verification are never editable or can be deleted once a verification has be created and saved.
An journal entry that can’t be deleted or edited needs to be added if a mistake is made in an verification.
So Manager isn’t complient to accounting software laws in Sweden as I understand it unless the “lock” mechanism function is changed or if it’s done another way to not have the possibility to edit or delete a verification once created and saved.
Verifications also needs unique verification numbers that can’t be edited or deleted. These are used to match the analog and digital verification. Unique verification numbers can be set in manager but they can be edited or deleted if the “lock” function is off.
Assume that an accountant with computer-based accounting and calendar year as fiscal year accounts every three months. In September, the accounting officer discovers that a transaction was wrongly recorded in February and establishes a special verification. The correction is posted in November together with other verifications regarding July - September. Thus, it is not possible to correct February’s accounting, but that period, including its errors, is fixed.
However, if the error is detected in early May when the month of February is reconciled, correction can be made in February (accounting period) as the item (to be corrected) is not yet permanently booked.
I read the whole document. I don’t find in any place that software accounting has to automatically lock a transaction.
So basically is up to you to demonstrate how you lock your results once the accounting period is closed (not daily as you say as you can read in the quotation up here!). Saving a pdf with the general ledger transactions together with an uneditable digital backup of the software and printing it in an official book every accounting period is sufficient to be compliant and under my point of view the only way.
I try to further explain the concept… Even if the software automatically locks the accountings you can edit them by accessing directly to the database. Every automated mechanism would imply the Authority to know how the software (every accounting software up there!) is written and if there are not back doors. So it’s up to you and not to the software to demonstrate how you close the period and make it uneditable (analogically and/or digitally).
In the text it says “The duration requiremnt means that what has been posted must not be erased or otherwise made illegible. It is only when this is met that a business event is considered posted.A business event that is recorded in, for example, Excel is not considered posted because it is not permanent.”
It says that a post can’t be deleted and that it has to be permanent…
Posts can be erased in Manager unless it’s locked. The lock in Manager can be removed and the post can be erased as well as edited. To me that means that this condition “ The duration requirement means that what has been posted must not be erased or otherwise made illegible is not fulfilled.
It also says “ A business event that is recorded in, for example, Excel is not considered posted because it is not permanent.”
For me a post that can be changed or edited is not permanent as in the text above with excel.
Have I missed something here or are posts on Manager permanent and can not be erased?
In the accounting program I used before posts could not be erased or edited after creation. If I don’t remember it incorrectly…when a period is locked no posts can be added. If I use “lock” in Manager, I “lock” the period but it can easily be unlocked and a post changed or erased and is not permanent…
I’m not sure if the audit trail will be enough to prove how things are posted since posts need to be permanent and can not be erased…
In my opinion, the written regulation is an example of all-too-frequent regulations that do not consider reality. The example of records in Excel not being posted because they are not permanent is ridiculous. Suppose your accounting file could never be changed by anyone after something was typed into it. The file could still be erased, so it is not permanent. And any primary school student these days would know how to copy a file before it is locked so it could be modified later—and only then locked. Any reasonably competent database programmer would know how to circumvent “locks” on a file. Whoever wrote the regulation was deluding themself.
It is interesting to note that, in all the years I have been moderating this forum, no Swedish user has raised this issue. (There are many Swedish users.)