A guide to Italian Accounting using Financials
This section offers general guidance to the ways in which you can use SunSystems to produce reports which comply with Italian statutory reporting requirements. It explains how, with co-ordinated use of the tools provided by SunSystems, you can produce these reports. It also suggests ways in which SunSystems' security features can be used to exercise maximum control over systems administration and journal entry.
Background
Legal
Italian law requires that organizations provide financial statements and fiscal reports for inspection by the authorities. Fiscal reports must be presented on officially stamped paper. Once finally produced neither financial statements nor fiscal reports can be revised.
The Prima Nota
Because organizations have to produce a definitive listing, it has become common practice in Italy to rough post all transactions to a rough book, the Prima Nota. Once entered, transactions and transaction details can be revised within the rough book until the civil or fiscal reports are required, when they are permanently posted to the main ledger.
Registration
The entry of all transactions to the rough book is stamped using a registration (entry) date. It is usual to supplement this date stamp with at least one incremental number which is, sometimes, prefixed with a code. In Italy, a user will usually want to set both a transaction sequence number on registration in the rough book and a daybook sequence number when the daybook is produced. These registration details are written onto the paperwork associated with the transaction. This provides an audit trail, leading from the statutory reports to the originating invoices, credit notes, and so on.
The Rough Book
Within SunSystems you can use the provisional posting facility as the Prima Nota. SunSystems allows you to post two types of transaction to the ledger: provisional postings and permanent postings.
Changing the setting of the Provisional Postings field in Ledger Setup (LES) to Mandatory ensures that all transactions are automatically posted as provisional postings. This is the equivalent of posting rough transactions to the rough book.
You can amend and report on them before posting them as permanent postings. This is the equivalent of hard posting the transaction.
If the Provisional Postings option is set to Optional, you can choose to post a transaction as either provisional or permanent.
Definitive Listings and Reports
Having posted your transactions as permanent postings, you can reprint at any time the definitive listings and reports required by the Italian authorities.