Process Documentation Software: the easy way

Easier to implement than its reputation suggests: procedural documentation. It is often thought that drawing it up is „cumbersome“, „time-consuming“ and „too expensive“. The fact is, however, that it has increasingly become a focus of tax audits. In accordance with the Principles for the Proper Maintenance and Retention of Books, Records and Documents in Electronic Form and for Data Access (GoBD), meaningful and up-to-date procedural documentation is necessary to ensure traceability and verifiability. Since the GoBD came into force in 2015, it has been a requirement that all system and procedural changes be documented in full, covering both content and timing. We are committed to making the creation of procedural documentation as straightforward as possible using our software.

The features of our Opti.Tax Doku software make it possible to create procedural documentation easily, efficiently, securely and quickly. This simplified process is based on a taxonomy we have developed – a structure that serves as a guide to help you get started.

The fields provided in the taxonomy are populated with individual values according to your organisation’s needs and circumstances, and are displayed in the report via live reporting whilst data is being entered. Unfilled fields do not appear as placeholders in the report. This means you always have the opportunity to continuously develop your procedural documentation and make it more comprehensive over time.

We first released version 1.0 of the taxonomy in 2016 and have continued to refine it since then. This has been made possible by the more than 100 tax consultancy firms that now use our solution to create and maintain procedural documentation with their clients, and to pass on their suggestions for expanding the taxonomy to us. Feedback from tax audits also helps us to expand the taxonomy in technical terms.

• As of May 2019, version 3.1 of the taxonomy for the creation and maintenance of procedural documentation is available.
• Version 3.2 is due out this week, and the next major step towards version 4.0 is currently in development.

To simplify the creation of procedural documentation, sample procedural documentation has been included in Opti.Tax Doku since release 19.1. These provide you with ideas on what could be documented and how. The forthcoming Release 19.2 will provide further sample procedural documentation, including for restaurants, hairdressers, tradespeople, and service and retail businesses. In addition, when creating a project, you can select the processes already in place within your organisation; these then simply need to be adapted to reflect the current situation in the procedural documentation.

In a further release, which we plan to roll out in the second half of 2019, we intend to introduce validation rules to provide you, the user, with even more detailed guidance on how to create procedural documentation. These rules check the content of fields in the taxonomy and provide you with guidance on which other fields should be completed.

• In Taxonomy 3.1, as a first step towards this functionality, mandatory fields were introduced to define the minimum scope of procedural documentation.
• In the next step, the taxonomy in version 4.0 will be expanded to include documentation and industry types.

These steps result in even greater convenience. This addition means that, when creating the procedural documentation, the structure can be filtered to include only the required fields and further streamlined.

It remains to be seen to what extent the tax authorities will further specify the content of procedural documentation in the next update to the GoBD. Be prepared for any eventuality – the creation of procedural documentation is, and will remain, guaranteed to be as straightforward as possible for all users who rely on our solution. You can sit back and relax: with hsp, procedural documentation is „the easy way“.