viernes, 2 de julio de 2010

Intrastat for Openbravo ERP

Intrastat is the system used to collect statistics on the trade of goods between European Union countries. All the VAT-registered companies in the European Union are required to provide information about arrivals (purchases, imports...) and dispatches (sales, exports...) of goods within the European Union.
Companies must submit to the authorities a valid file containing all the information related to these movements.

Openbravo ERP supports Intrastat since 2.50MP12 through the installation of several modules. In this post I give you a summary about how to get the Intrastat file ready to be submitted to the authorities using Openbravo ERP.


Modules definition
Currently, the Instrastat feature for Openbravo ERP is mainly divided into the following modules:
  • Intrastat, which is the core of the functionality. It provides a generic and country agnostic framework for managing Intrastat-related transactions.
  • Intrastat for Spain, which runs on top of the Intrastat framework and implements the concrete business logic for Spain. It is also in charge of creating the Intrastat file compatible with the Spanish requirements.
  • Intrastat - Spanish translation, which adds the Spanish (Spain) translation for the Intrastat module.

How to install it

All these modules are stored into the Central Repository, so you can install them as usual, i.e. using the Module Management in your Openbravo ERP environment.
Take into account that these modules are distributed under a commercial license that requires acquiring an activation key before the installation. However, these modules are available at zero cost to Professional Edition subscribers. Please contact your Openbravo Partner in case of doubts.


Configuring your data
The Intrastat report stores a great amount of data that is almost impossible to manage manually. If you want Openbravo ERP to generate the report for you, you first need to invest some time in properly configuring your data. For example, you need to add the Intrastat information for your Products and Business Partners:



The more detailed configuration you enter into the ERP, the faster it will generate the Intrastat file. So it's up to you ;-)


How it works

Each time you enter an Intracommunity transaction into the system, the Intrastat framework will automatically catch it. Several tabs have been added to the ERP in order to manage Intrastat transactions, like for example at invoice line level:



The system will retrieve the information you have previously entered in your Master Data and it will populate this tab.


How to get the Intrastat file
Whenever you want to get the Intrastat file, you can use the Intrastat Launcher window available at Intrastat || Analysis Tools || Intrastat Launcher || Intrastat Launcher:


This process creates/updates an Intrastat declaration in draft status based on the transactions available in the system for the selected period. The declaration can be reviewed by the user at Intrastat || Analysis Tools || Intrastat Declaration window.


Inside the lines tab, the user has the opportunity to manually modify the fields in case he needs to change something in a particular transaction, or even to create new lines or exclude some of them from the report.

Once the Intrastat declaration is processed, the user can easily get the file pressing the Generate File button.




Remember, this post is a brief summary about the Intrastat capabilities in Openbravo ERP. If you want to learn more about them, visit the project's home page, and specially the project's wiki where you will find the Functional and Technical documentation of the project (English) and also the complete User Manual (Spanish only).