SAF-T Extended

SAF-T Extended is a small, vendor-neutral accounting archive format.

It combines four things:

1. official SAF-T Financial XML for the ledger
2. original accounting documents
3. small JSONL files for customers, suppliers, employees, departments, projects, products and sales orders
4. one manifest containing checksums, document-to-transaction links and any source documents the exporting system could not return

Version 0.4 defines exactly those seven portable object schemas. Exporters may also include integrity-listed files under extras/; those files have no standardized meaning and conforming importers may ignore them.

Why this exists

SAF-T is the right interchange format for accounts, tax codes, dimensions and ledger transactions. It is less suitable as a simple application import format for operational master data and sales orders, and it does not carry the source files behind the postings.

SAF-T Extended fills only those two gaps. It does not replace or modify SAF-T.

Package

manifest.json
saf-t/
objects/
  customers.jsonl    # when non-empty
  suppliers.jsonl    # when non-empty
  employees.jsonl    # when non-empty
  departments.jsonl  # when non-empty
  projects.jsonl     # when non-empty
  products.jsonl     # when non-empty
  orders.jsonl       # when non-empty
documents/
extras/              # optional, non-standard supplementary files

Each JSONL file is written and listed only when it has at least one record. Every field defined by its schema is emitted for every record; an unknown value is null. Documents are stored once and linked to exact SAF-T transactions in manifest.json whenever the relationship is known. missingDocuments is also always present and is an empty array when every discovered document was exported.

The normative rules are in spec/package.md. JSON Schemas are in spec/, and examples/minimal-package/ is a complete package that passes the validator:

python3 tools/validate-package.py examples/minimal-package

Distribution

A package is distributed as a Zstandard-compressed tar archive named *.tar.zst. Extract it with:

zstd -dc export.tar.zst | tar -xf -

The uncompressed directory and the archive contain the same package. Compression and media optimization do not change the logical format.

Implementer

ReAI is the only listed implementer of version 0.4. See IMPLEMENTERS.md.

Design principles

• one canonical representation of each fact
• original evidence, not export-generated presentations
• fixed names and schemas instead of vendor conventions
• checksums and explicit transaction links
• formats that can be read without a database engine or proprietary software
• fail validation instead of silently accepting a partial or ambiguous package

New object types require a vendor-neutral schema and a demonstrated accounting use case that cannot be represented by SAF-T, the existing JSONL objects or source documents.

Official sources

• https://www.skatteetaten.no/en/business-and-organisation/start-and-run/best-practices-accounting-and-cash-register-systems/saf-t-financial/
• https://github.com/Skatteetaten/saf-t
• https://anskaffelser.dev/postaward/g3/spec/current/billing-3.0/norway/
• https://docs.peppol.eu/poacc/billing/3.0/bis/