Your rates are not constants in our code

Most accounting software hard-codes the rates and updates them when someone remembers. In Macct every rate is a dated row with its source, the sentence it came from, and the name of whoever approved it — and three separate machines shout when one starts to go stale. That is how you get the deductions you are entitled to, in the year you are entitled to them.

A rate is a row, not a number in the source code

Every rate Macct calculates with lives in a versioned rule set. Each row carries seven things, and none of them are optional:

No rate goes into production automatically. A proposed rate is a draft; it becomes a tested row; and only a human approval — recorded with a name and a written basis — makes it the number your accounts are calculated with. The old row is never overwritten. It is retired, and it stays readable, so a voucher from 2024 can still be explained with the rate that applied in 2024.

The year matters — and most systems get this wrong

Norwegian rates move. The entertainment allowance moves every single year. The small-balance threshold in the Tax Act doubled in 2024. The National Insurance basic amount changes on 1 May, not 1 January. A system that stores one number per rate will quietly measure a 2024 voucher against a 2026 limit — and nobody notices, because nothing crashes.

Macct stores one row per year and picks the row that covers the date of your entry. Two examples from our own rule set:

Rate 2024 2025 2026 Source
Entertainment, per person 562 kr579 kr592 kr Rate regulation § 10
Small-balance write-off, full deduction below 30 000 kr30 000 kr30 000 kr Tax Act § 14-47 (15 000 up to and incl. 2023)

Both of those rows are dated. Re-run a 2023 depreciation today and Macct still measures it against the 15 000 that applied then. That is not a detail — it is the difference between a defensible set of accounts and a plausible-looking one.

Three guards, and none of them are you

Storing the source is not enough. Sources change, and the ones that change quietly are the dangerous ones. So Macct runs three independent checks, on a schedule, whether anyone is looking or not.

Every morning

Expiry guard

Does every approved rate still cover today's date? Does one expire within 30 days without a successor? Has one gone more than 15 months without being re-checked against its source — long enough to have survived a new year unnoticed?

On the 1st of each month

Source monitor

Watches the published rate pages themselves. When the numbers on the source page move, it drafts the new version and puts it in the approval queue — as a proposal for a human, never as a silent change.

Every Monday

Statutory-reference guard

Takes all 99 statutory references Macct makes — in warnings, on these pages, in the code itself — and checks each one against Lovdata. If a provision is moved, renamed or repealed, we hear about it that week.

That third guard is not theoretical. The Accounting Act moved the small-company thresholds from § 1-6 to § 1-5 on 1 November 2024. The Companies Act removed the half-of-share-capital trigger from § 3-5 back in 2013. The Tax Act raised two thresholds from 15 000 to 30 000 with effect from the 2024 income year. Every one of those is a change that leaves your software quietly citing a rule that no longer exists — unless something is watching.

What this gives you: the deductions you are entitled to

A correct rate is not paperwork. It is money, in both directions — and it is the small, boring thresholds that cost the most, because nobody checks them.

  1. Buy equipment and Macct tells you, at the moment you post it, whether it crosses the capitalisation threshold — and if it does not, that you may expense it in full this year instead of depreciating it over time.
  2. A depreciation balance that has fallen below the small-balance threshold is written off in full rather than dragged out at 20 % a year. That threshold doubled in 2024; a system still holding the old number quietly gives you a smaller deduction than the law allows.
  3. Entertainment is checked against the limit for the year of the receipt — and Macct tells you plainly that exceeding the limit per person removes the deduction for the whole cost, not just the excess. That is a rule people get wrong in the expensive direction.
  4. Pay a business expense of 10 000 kroner or more in cash and you lose the deduction — for the cost and for the VAT. Macct refuses the entry instead of letting you find out at the audit.
  5. Deduct input VAT without an attachment, or without an identifiable supplier, and you get told — with the provision that says so — while it is still easy to fix.

Where the numbers come from

Primary sources only. We read the rate tables the Norwegian Tax Administration publishes, and the statutory text on Lovdata. We do not copy rates from blogs, competitors or last year's spreadsheet, and we do not fetch a live figure at the moment of calculation — a rate you cannot reproduce is a rate you cannot defend. Every value is frozen into an approved row with the date it was read.

Rates: skatteetaten.no/satser. Statutory text: lovdata.no. Both are linked from the row itself, so an accountant or an auditor can check our work without asking us.

What we do not promise

We will not tell you that a rate can never be out of date here. It can. A new rate is published, and there is a window before someone approves it. What we promise is that the window is short, that it is visible, and that it is somebody's job — not yours — to close it. The guards above exist precisely because we found rates in our own system that had gone two years without being re-checked, and we would rather build the machine that catches that than claim it cannot happen.

Macct is accounting software, not your accountant. We calculate, we flag and we cite the provision — you, or your accounting firm, make the judgement calls. Every warning we raise names the rule behind it, so you can check us rather than trust us.

All of it, in the flat price

Updated rates are not a premium tier. They are included in Macct's flat price of 250 kr/month ex. VAT — together with bookkeeping, invoicing, payroll, VAT returns, the tax return, annual accounts, the shareholder register, travel expenses and time tracking.