The Accounting Entries File has become a central requirement of digital tax audits across OHADA. Here is how to generate one without pain.
Procura team · May 2026 · 7 min readThe Accounting Entries File (FEC) is the standardized format that restores, in a single structure, every accounting entry of a fiscal year. It has become the cornerstone of digital tax audits across OHADA.
In Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Togo and Cameroon, national tax authorities have implemented or announced programs to digitize tax audits, including FEC requirements. Exact modalities (production deadline, technical format) are published case-by-case by each national tax authority.
Failure to produce a compliant FEC exposes the company to sanctions defined by each country's tax code. Depending on the case, this can range from a fixed fine to a presumption of non-kept accounting, opening the way to ex-officio taxation. The detail of sanctions has to be verified in the applicable national tax code.
The SYSCOHADA FEC aligns on the French BOFIP standard. Every accounting entry row carries 18 specific fields: journal code and label, entry number and date, account number and label, auxiliary account number and label, document reference and date, entry caption, debit, credit, lettering, lettering date, validation date, currency amount, currency code.
The format is a flat file (TXT, CSV or XML) encoded in UTF-8 without BOM, using a pipe or tab separator. Sorting must follow strict chronological order by date and entry number.
Every cell has strict formatting rules. Dates in YYYYMMDD. Amounts in decimal with a point separator. Accounts in SYSCOHADA Révisé format.
A FEC can be rejected for several reasons. The most frequent: an entry that doesn't balance debits and credits, while AUDCIF Article 17 mandates double-entry on every document.
Second: non-sequential entry numbers, which expose gaps (deleted entries) or duplicates. Third: missing validation, when the validation date is empty or later than the close date.
Fourth: the use of accounts outside the SYSCOHADA Révisé chart applicable since January 1st, 2018.
AUDCIF Article 24 requires accounting documents to be kept for ten years. This applies to the FEC, supporting documents, aged balances, annexes.
Retention must be tamper-evident. In practice: electronic signature of the file at generation, qualified timestamping, two-location backup.
The statutory auditor checks this chain at the annual audit. Any break leads to a qualification on the audit opinion.
Procura ships native FEC generation for OHADA countries. The format follows the 18 normalized columns. Validation happens automatically on every entry, so any posted entry is FEC-eligible immediately.
Export runs in one click from the Comptia screen. Qualified timestamping and electronic signature are included.
The Audit Trail module retains supporting documents for ten years and lets you reconstruct any entry, its author, source and approval chain.
See how Procura digitizes your SYSCOHADA procurement cycle, from request to payment.