Setting up the DATEV export

The DATEV export is included in the Pro plan. Zeitflex generates two formats: LODAS and Lohn und Gehalt. Your payroll office knows which one is yours — ask them before you set anything up.

What you need from your payroll office

Without these four details, the export does not work:

Your tax adviser decides the wage type numbers. What Zeitflex pre-fills there (100 for hours, 200 for overtime, 300 onwards for premiums, 400 onwards for tips and bonuses) are placeholders, not a DATEV standard — do not leave them unchanged without asking.

Call once and ask exactly for these. The call takes five minutes and saves you three failed attempts.

Step by step

1. Open Settings → Payroll & export.
2. Enter the Adviser number (Beraternummer) and Client number (Mandantennummer) — exactly as your tax adviser gives them, without adding leading zeros.
3. Enter your tax adviser's wage types: basic hours, overtime, night, Sunday and public holiday premium. For Lohn und Gehalt only the numbers 1 to 5999 and 9000 to 9999 are possible, for LODAS 1 to 9999.
4. Save.
5. Close a month and download the file in your payroll office's format in the month-end close (Month-end close, step 4).
6. Send the file to your payroll office as a test before you use it for a real payroll run.

The result: A file built according to the DATEV interface description — character set Windows-1252, line ending CRLF, extension .txt, your client number in the file name. Whether your payroll office can import it is only shown by the test import in step 6.

For Lohn und Gehalt: set up the format description once

The Lohn und Gehalt file has no column headings. Which field means what is defined once by your tax adviser in the ASCII import assistant of Lohn und Gehalt, as a so-called format description. Pass on these details:

After that, your tax adviser imports every month with the same description. For LODAS this is not necessary: there the file describes its own structure.

Personnel numbers must match

The most common reason why an import in the payroll software fails: the personnel number in Zeitflex is different from the one in DATEV.

For each person under Employees, enter exactly the number your payroll office uses. Not “1, 2, 3”, but the real one.

DATEV only knows the personnel number as a number from 1 to 99999. Once the adviser and client numbers are stored, Zeitflex checks this when you enter it in the employee form and during an import (the row is then not imported), and writes the number to the file without leading zeros (“007” becomes “7”). If a person has no number or it is not such a number, Zeitflex creates no DATEV file and names the people affected instead — there is no made-up substitute number. Adding the number is enough: the export then takes it from the employee form, even for a month that is already closed.

If your payroll office does not use DATEV

Not every payroll office works with DATEV. There are two routes, both from Starter:

• CSV export — the same values as for DATEV, in a generally readable table.
• Your own payroll profile — under Settings, tab Export profiles, you define which columns appear, in which order and under which heading. Intended for Lexware, Stotax, ADDISON, Sage or a freely configured CSV. Your profile is then offered as a format in the monthly closing.

Troubleshooting

The last point happens more often than you would think: download the file and forward it without opening it.

Still stuck?

If your tax adviser is to collect the files directly instead of receiving them by email: Inviting your tax adviser.