Horizon accounting system

Last updated

The Horizon accounting system is an accounting software and electronic point of sale (EPOS) system developed by Fujitsu for the Post Office in the UK. The problems with the Horizon system have been a central part in of a group litigation in what is known as the British Post Office scandal.

Contents

The Post Office introduced Horizon in about 1999/2000 as a new computerised system for the accounting function both in the post office branches, and between the branches and itself. This was (and still is) called Horizon. [1]

History

Horizon was preceded first by a computer system named ECCO+ (Electronic Cash Registers at Counters) and then Capture, both of which had been used in post offices throughout the 1990s.

ECCO+ was an offline, floppy disk based EPOS system on PC hardware, which was designed for use in Crown offices (directly managed branches, as opposed to sub offices). In its later years it was also used at some subpostmaster-run branches, which had been converted from Crown offices as part of the general reduction in the directly managed network. [2] Capture was developed by Compaq, and had been rolled out to 300 post offices in 1995. [3]

There have been two main versions of the Horizon system with radically different architectures from each other; the first in use from 1999 until 2010, and the second from 2010 onwards.

The first, known as Legacy Horizon within the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, was built on the Riposte product from Escher Group Ltd. Data was stored in the post office terminals, replicated between terminals and transmitted to servers in the data centres. [4]

Business applications on Legacy Horizon (including EPOSS (EPOS Service), the accounting application) were written by Fujitsu. The history and poor state of the EPOSS software is described in 2001 in an internal Fujitsu document "Report on the EPOSS PinICL TaskForce". [5]

The second version, known as Horizon Online or HNG-X, was a complete rewrite by Fujitsu, over several years up to 2010, using (as the name suggests) a fully online architecture, with all data held on a central database. An update to this, known as Horizon Anywhere or HNG-A, based on the same online architecture, was deployed in 2017 and is still in use in 2025. [6]

Horizon IT scandal

The Horizon IT scandal involved the Post Office pursuing thousands of innocent subpostmasters for apparent financial shortfalls caused by faults in Horizon. More than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data. [7]

References

  1. ↑ "Judgment (No.3) "Common Issues"" (PDF). Courts and Tribunals Judiciary. p. Paragraph 5. Retrieved 4 November 2025.
  2. ↑ Flinders, Karl (23 October 2024). "Federation requests government investigation into third Post Office branch system". Computer Weekly. Retrieved 2025-04-11.
  3. ↑ "Controversial Post Office Capture system was developed in-house | Computer Weekly". ComputerWeekly.com. Archived from the original on 21 February 2024. Retrieved 21 February 2024.
  4. ↑ Patterson, Paul (28 September 2022). "First Corporate Statement of Fujitsu Services Limited" (PDF). Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. p. 4. Retrieved 8 April 2025.
  5. ↑ "Report on the EPOSS PinICL Task Force" (PDF). Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. 14 May 2001. Retrieved 8 April 2025.
  6. ↑ "Opening Statement on behalf of Fujitsu Services Limited" (PDF). Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry. Retrieved 8 April 2025.
  7. ↑ "Post Office Horizon scandal: Why hundreds of people were wrongly prosecuted". BBC News. 2021-04-21. Retrieved 2025-11-08.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.