On Friday, February 27th, the Mexico SAT announced a delay on the initial filings for Contabilidad Electronica until April 3rd (Chart of Accounts and Trial Balances) and July 1st (Journal Entries). Since there have been lots of questions regarding the impact of these changes over the past week, I wanted to provide some guidance on this announcement.
There are several key takeaways including: :
- Technical specifications have not changed
- Focus your efforts on Polizas (Journal Entries) – most companies have been focused to date on Chart of Accounts and Trial Balances. The UUID (government signing attribute) needs to accompany G/L entries for proof of tax credits and deductions. This is required in 4 functional areas:
- Sales – all of your domestic sales need to be justified by a corresponding XML invoice containing the approved UUID
- Inbound Procurement – 95% of companies still process account payables off the PDF and 90% of invoices don’t contain a Purchase Order number as the field is not a standard field in the government XML. Remember, this bucket will be the bulk of your tax deductions. And each XML issue could result in a backing out of your deduction and a fine of up to $3,000 USD per invalid entry in the G/L.
- Gastos (Travel & Expenses) - are often overlooked as well by teams just focused on extraction. Most G/L entries for T&E are done at the grain of the expense report. However, in Mexico, an expense report could have 4 corresponding XMLs that need to be linked (i.e. one of the flight, one for the hotel, one for the car, and one for the meal).
- Nomina (Paychecks) – need to have UUID at grain of employee, but G/L entry for payroll is typically done at the level of Cost Center.
The real issue is not extraction for the majority of companies nor whether the field exists in SAP. Rather the real problem is how you collect the XML, extract the UUID, and link that document to your FI entries within SAP. Do not let these new dates delay your implementation.
