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ISA² - Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens

Reducing the administrative burden on businesses

2016.11 Automatic Business Reporting          

FUNDING CONCLUDED

When is this action of interest to you? 

You run a small or medium-sized enterprise and you have to invest a considerable amount of time and resources on reporting to public authorities.

To reinforce your competitiveness, you would like to establish an easy digital way to communicate your data to public authorities.

What is this action about?

Reporting to public authorities is a significant burden for businesses, especially for small or medium-sized enterprises, as it often requires providing the same data repeatedly to various levels of public administration. The way to improve the situation is through automatic business reporting. This concept involves a central repository storing standardised data from individual companies. Public institutions would have access to the data and can reuse them instead of requiring information from businesses again. The approach can facilitate the way companies do accounting, and will help to strengthen Europe's Digital Single Market.

What are the objectives?

The ISA² action will investigate the potential of automating data exchange between companies and public authorities in the European Union.

What are the benefits?

For small and medium-sized enterprises:

  • Lower administrative burden
  • Lower cost of reporting to public authorities
  • Greater digitisation of individual companies
  • Strengthened competitiveness and growth
  • Easier business-to-business relations

For the EU economy

  • Strengthened competitiveness and growth
  • Improved Digital Single Market

What has been achieved? 
The financial potential of introducing ABR for SMEs’ data exchange with their banks is estimated to DKK 361,9m of which 70% stems from reduced accounting fees. This is only a part of the full potential, since not all aspects have been considered in this analysis. Moreover the analysis has identified barriers to achieve the full potential estimated from ABR:

  • Full automation cannot be accomplished by using bookkeeping data alone
  • Privacy and security are essential, if companies are going to share data
  • Data interpretation must not be fully autonomous

What are the next steps? 
Denmark and the Nordic region are currently identifying all the central aspects for fulfilling the vision of ABR. These findings will be concluded in the beginning of 2020. Political action will be the next natural step based on these findings.