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Certification of cashier software - Norme NF525
History of the norm NF525
The Finance Act 2016, on the official ground of “Improving VAT collection”, has provided that should apply to “management software” new mandatory conditions “Unalterability, security, storage and archiving of data”, Partly impractical: it is difficult to imagine how a software publisher can guarantee retention and archiving on systems for which it is not an administrator.
This law would have been designed to alleviate some of the problems of VAT collection in Austria and Italy, two countries that make extensive use of cash transactions. It was then brought to the European level, then transcribed into the law of the member states, forcing apple sellers on the French markets to use (and finance) software with a level of quasi-banking security. This goes a long way towards building a genuine anti-European feeling, which, however, is to be regretted.
AFNOR immediately defined a standard called NF525, listing the characteristics that software would have to present if they wanted to claim compliance with the provisions of the 2016 Finance Act.
Then, in June 2017, Corporate Services decided that it was wonderfully absurd to apply this constraint to businesses that do not charge VAT (including 500,000 micro-businesses out of 750,000), as well as to software that only deals with collection indirectly. They therefore decided that this standard was only applicable to “cash register software”, and to exclude those who were not concerned with the collection and recovery of VAT.
There was still a problem that there was still no tax definition of “cash register software”, Also many companies have been panicked by the vagueness of these provisions, translated in Article 88 of the Finance Law no. 2015-1785 and entered into force on 01/01/2018. Panic, moreover, exploited wisely to generate sales not necessarily useful…
Six months after the date of application of the law, the Directorate General of Public Finance (DGFiP) published a definition of the cashier software at BOFIP on 4 July 2018. Case rare enough to be reported, the quality of the definition rewarded our expectation.
The text of Article I-B-30 specifies as follows: :
A cashier’s software or system is a computer system with cashier functionality, which consists in storing and recording extra-accounting payments received in return for a sale of goods or provision of services, i.e.that the recorded payment does not simultaneously, automatically and obligatorily generate the posting of an accounting entry. Payments for which the software or system is required to trigger instantaneously and automatically, without human intervention, shall not be considered to be recorded extra-accounting, regardless of the method of payment, an entry in the accounting information system. All the software or cash systems allowing the registration of the payments of their customers whatever the method of payment (cash, cheques, CB, transfers, debits...). This obligation applies even in case of registration on a software or system accessible online.
This definition is particularly consistent with the spirit of the law: in the legislator’s intention, these were measures concerning software separate from the business management software. The typical example is a touchpad used by a seller in a market, which allows him to edit cash tickets and record payments, and which he records at the end of the day, the results (the Z ticket) in the company’s management system.
As regards Gestan
We followed very closely the development of this case, and when reading the initial texts (before the statement of the definition of a cashier software by the DGFiP), our interpretation was to consider Gestan as a management software and not a cashier software: which meant that in the commonly accepted sense of “cash register software”, In the absence of an official tax definition, Gestan users did not need to certify compliance with the provisions of the 2016 Finance Act, unless they use the Caisse Tactile extension, which we thought was called “cashier software”.
The definition of the BOFiP confirms our initial interpretation: Gestan does not allow to record extra-accounting payments (as soon as a payment is recorded in Gestan, an accounting entry is generated automatically), Gestan is not affected by the provisions that apply to “cashier software”.
However, as a Gestan can be used in pre-accounting, and generally in order not to be put in difficulty by a different interpretation, we have integrated in Gestan the technical mechanisms of traceability of modification of records, as of version 15.00 released on 01/01/2018.
Whether or not the Cash Touch extension is used, the traceability mechanism now integrated in Gestan records any creation, modification, or deletion in the accounting files. And in the extension “Touch Box” was added a button to print the attestation of compliance with the provisions of the Finance Law 2016, which you can present to any control.
This law is sometimes referred to as “anti-fraud law”, We refuse to use the term. Indeed, this designation is more a matter of political marketing than of legislative work, insofar as:
- No law prevents fraud: it defines its limits. What is “anti-fraud” are agents of the police force, control agents, surveillance cameras, barriers, even barbuzas or the civic sense, etc. But not the law;
- This designation imposes a presumption of guilt on any company, which is supposed to defraud a priori. This suspicion is itself contrary to the presumption of innocence enshrined in the law;
- This term implies that with this law, all fraud would have disappeared, in order to give it an indisputable character, which is obviously nonsense.
Like some industrialists who do green-washing at a good price, adopt antinomic laws for political marketing reasons, as in the case of so-called “ecological” taxation, which will abound in the accounts of the State long before worrying about ecology, of the “Pentecost tax” which was supposed to go to the elderly, but which they have never seen, of the “ecotax”, which was supposed to make it possible to maintain the roads, of “barrier gestures” Making it seem that they made invulnerable to the Coronavirus, the examples are so numerous that listing them all would be tedious, falls under the assumed use of semantics as a tool of propaganda.
As a reminder, in the field of public accounting, there is no pre-allocation of tax revenue: all tax revenue joins the common pot of state revenue, and is used not according to its source, But the provisions of the annual finance law.
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INFO This page is a translation of the Certification des logiciels de caisse - Norme NF525, written in French. You can help improve it by registering with the documentation service.
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