At the end of the month, as the employer you prepare payroll: approve the hours, close the month and pass the file to your tax adviser. You can only approve a month once it has ended.
1. Approve hours
Open “Menu” → “Time & pay” → “Time tracking” and tap the “Monthly statement” card. Choose the location and month at the top.
In the “Approve hours” section, check the entries. Untick anything that is not right yet.
Tap “Approve … entries”. Approved entries are then locked. With “Withdraw approval” and a reason, you can open them again.
With “Download for payroll”, you also get the approved hours as a CSV file.
2. Close the month
Open “Menu” → “Time & pay” → “Month-end close”, or tap the “Month-end close and DATEV” card at the bottom of the “Monthly statement”.
Work through the “Checklist”, for example “Still clocked in”, “Time entries not approved”, “Open correction requests” or “No pay set in the personnel file”.
Tap “Approve month” and confirm. After that, the month's data is locked.
If you need to change something later, use “Start correction” with a reason to start a correction run.
3. Create the DATEV file
Once, in the browser, choose the “Tax adviser software” under “DATEV settings”. DATEV is the payroll software most German tax advisers use. Enter the “Adviser number” and “Client number” and set up the “Wage types”.
In the “DATEV file” section, first tap “Create test file” and have your tax adviser check the file.
Then tap “Create file”. It appears under “Files created”, where you can use “Download” (in the app: “Share file”).
Important: Monthly salaries are not in the file, because they are stored as master data in DATEV. Agree the format with your tax adviser before you hand over the first file for payroll.
4. Link for your tax adviser
Tap “Create link” next to the file you created.
Copy the link with “Copy” and send it to your tax adviser. It is only shown this one time.
Your tax adviser opens the link and the file downloads straight away, without an account.
The link is valid for 14 days. In the list, you see “valid until” and how often it has been opened, and you can make it invalid at once with “Revoke”.
Do not mix them up: for the other direction, where your tax adviser uploads payslips, there is a separate upload link under Payroll documents.