For its latest Creating Conversations podcast, Sage's accountants division joined forces with Digita, Companies House and a group of accountants and journalists to explore the potential for open data exchange standards between tax and practice applications. John Stokdyk reports
Accounting data standards
XBRL - XML-based business reporting language, accepted by Companies House for electronic submission of statutory accounts. Roughly 15% of UK accounts filings are made in XBRL format and HMRC wants to extend it to support corporation tax submissions.
XAPL - XML-based standard for client data developed with the encouragement of the ICAEW. So far, only Digita and Star have put the mechanism into their applications.
SAF-T - Standard Audit File (text) - OECD-endorsed text output format for financial transaction data. Dutch tax authorities use it to pick up data from tax and accounts software and developers are keen for it to be used in the UK.
Explaining his motives for convening the talking shop, Sage accountants division managing director Greg Ford said he wanted to kick start a campaign to push for the adoption of open standards such as xAPL, XBRL and SAF-T (see box) to expand interoperability between tax, accounting and accounts production and practice management applications.
The potential benefits for accountants is enormous, Ford said just before he recorded the podcast. "End to end integration isn't just final accounts. It starts further back. For example if you take data from Sage 50 into Digita Accounts Pro, how do you handle adjustments? You submit accounts to Companies House, but are the adjustments going back to final accounts? An open data standard would be beneficial to accountants by allowing the adjustments to flow back into Sage through the end to end process."
Remarkably, the Sage campaign won whole-hearted support from one of the developer's aspiring rivals. During the podcast, Digita managing director Jerry Rihll explained: "Co-operation between software vendors helps a lot and helps build a business case.
"The reality is an awful lot of our customers are using Sage products, and the more we can work together and hook up, the better service we can give clients. I suppose that’s one of the reason’s we’re sharing lunch together - because we passionately believe in that. And that’s not typical in the industry, because a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping a closed garden, and we’re trying to change that, we’re trying to change it through the institute and through events like this."
