AUDCIF Article 20: why monthly centralization is mandatory and how to automate it

What Article 20 says

AUDCIF Article 20 (Uniform OHADA Act on accounting and financial information) requires any company keeping auxiliary journals to centralize, at least once a month, the entries from those journals into a master journal called Livre-journal or central journal (LC).

This applies to companies under the actual-profit regime, which covers nearly all SMEs and large companies in the OHADA region.

Non-compliance creates a presumption of accounting irregularity that can justify ex-officio taxation in a tax audit.

The 6 standard auxiliary journals

SYSCOHADA recommends six auxiliary journals. Purchases journal (HA) for supplier transactions. Sales journal (VE) for customer transactions. Bank journal (BQ) for bank operations. Cash journal (CA). Miscellaneous operations journal (OD) for payroll, depreciation, provisions. Opening balances journal (AN) for fiscal-year opening.

Each auxiliary journal records its domain entries chronologically. At month-end, totals by account are posted into the master LC (general ledger journal).

The LC is the single auditable proof of monthly accounting activity. It is what the statutory auditor or the tax authority consults first.

Consequences of missed centralization

Tax consequence first. Without a monthly LC, the tax inspector can rule that accounting is not regularly kept. This opens ex-officio taxation on contested items, with no contradictory debate.

Audit consequence next. The statutory auditor will include a qualification in their opinion. A qualification can affect bank credit, investor confidence, central credit registry ratings.

Operational consequence finally. Without an LC, reconstructing the history of a transaction becomes hard. The audit trail is broken.

The cost of doing it manually

In a typical OHADA SME running on Sage 100, Ciel or Excel, monthly centralization is a manual task done by the accountant at month-end.

It involves totaling, in each auxiliary journal, debits and credits per account number, then posting a recap entry in the general journal. Across six journals and many active accounts, this task takes between two and five hours a month.

It is a no-value-add task. No decision comes out of it. No client is served. It is pure compliance work. It is also very error-prone.

How Procura automates Article 20

Procura ships the monthly centralization routine natively. A button on the Comptia Month Close screen launches the process in one click.

The system creates the LC journal automatically if it doesn't exist. It consolidates account totals from each auxiliary (HA, VE, BQ, CA, OD, AN) over the selected period. It posts one centralization entry per auxiliary with a normalized number (for example LC-2026-05-HA for the May 2026 purchases journal).

The operation is idempotent. Re-running centralization on an already-centralized month doesn't duplicate: the system deletes prior centralization entries and reposts. This lets accountants re-centralize after a month-end adjustment.