DATEV interface: booking batches and documents, ready for your tax advisor to import

Two booking batches per month: revenue and payments

Each month, Rechnungskit creates two separate EXTF booking batches, for SKR03 or SKR04 (the two standard German charts of accounts). Why you want this and what it saves your tax advisor (Steuerberater) is on the page DATEV export for online shops (German). This page is the technical reference: what exactly is in the files and how they arrive in DATEV. The basics for each source are covered in the guides Stripe to DATEV (German) and WooCommerce DATEV export (German).

Revenue: One booking per invoice and VAT rate. The export distinguishes domestic sales at 19% and 7%, EU sales for the OSS return (German), reverse charge, intra-community supplies, exports, chain transactions and Kleinunternehmer (small-business exemption) sales. Cancellations are booked with a reference to the original invoice, down payments with a reclassification at the final invoice, and voucher sales to the liability account. If you use accrual accounting, you also get deferred revenue (German, pRAP) for prepaid services: the deferral in the invoice month and the release in every following month, net and to the day.

Payments: Incoming payments per payment provider go to their own transit account (Geldtransitkonto). Stripe, Mollie, PayPal, Unzer, GoCardless and Klarna each get their own, preset to 1360 to 1365 in SKR03 and 1460 to 1465 in SKR04. Fees are booked per provider statement as a separate expense with BU key 506 (reverse charge under § 13b UStG), payouts as a movement from the transit account to the bank, plus refunds, chargebacks and reconciliation differences as booking types of their own. Nothing is netted silently.

If a booking type has no account mapping, the export cannot be finalized. Rechnungskit names the missing booking types so that you or your tax advisor can add them first. Test documents from the test mode never appear in the export.

The EXTF format in detail

The file is a DATEV booking batch in EXTF format 700 (data category 21, format version 13) with the header data Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen needs for the import: advisor number, client number, start of fiscal year, G/L account length (4 to 6 digits) and period. Without an advisor and client number, the export can still be created; it just cannot be imported directly at the tax firm.

Each booking line contains the amount, debit/credit indicator, account, contra account, BU key, document date, document field 1 with the invoice number, booking text and, in field 20, the document link. Invoices in a foreign currency also carry the exchange rate and the base amount in euros, using the same frozen rate that appears on the invoice, so DATEV and the invoice never drift apart. The accounting currency is the euro.

Encoding: Windows-1252, without BOM, CRLF line endings. That is exactly what Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen and Unternehmen online expect. The export page logs replaced characters with line and field; you can switch to UTF-8 in the DATEV settings for programs that cannot read Windows-1252.

Documents to DATEV: document link plus Belegtransfer package

For every revenue export, Rechnungskit builds a DATEV package in the background. It contains:

• the EXTF booking batch (EXTF_Buchungsstapel_<JJJJ-MM>.csv), in which every invoice booking carries a document link in field 20: BEDI "<GUID>". Rechnungskit assigns the GUID once per invoice and keeps it in every later export. Only archived invoices get a link; a link to a file that is not in the package is never written.
• the Belegtransfer package Belege_<Mandant>_<JJJJ-MM>.zip with a document.xml (DATEV format version 6.0) and one PDF per invoice. The PDF is the archived ZUGFeRD invoice, so it is the e-invoice at the same time. From 5,000 documents or 500 MB, it is split into partial packages _1.zip, _2.zip, which are built one after another and stored separately; an error in partial package 3 does not throw away packages 1 and 2. The limit is 20,000 documents or 2 GB per export; split larger periods across several exports.
• LIESMICH_Kanzlei.txt (read-me for the tax firm) with the import instructions and Protokoll.txt (log) with the number of bookings with and without a document, the size of each partial package and a list of missing documents.

Order in DATEV: documents first, then the booking batch. The Belegtransfer package goes to Unternehmen online via DATEV Belegtransfer or the XML-Schnittstelle online. After that, the tax firm imports the batch into Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen, and DATEV attaches the document images automatically via the GUID. The other way round, the bookings stay without document images. Rechnungskit points this out on the export page, in the tax firm's client access and in the LIESMICH file.

Payment exports contain no document images; fee and payout bookings have no document link. If your tax firm does not work with Unternehmen online, turn off the Belegtransfer package in the DATEV settings and you get a simple document ZIP instead, with the invoice number as the file name plus index.csv, suitable for a document management system or Pennylane.

Debtors: one collective debtor or one number per customer

The default is a collective debtor, one number for all customer sales. Alternatively, you book per payment provider, per payment method, or with an individual debtor per customer. With individual debtors, Rechnungskit assigns numbers automatically from a configurable range (preset to start at 10001), optionally only for business customers, so the chart of accounts does not balloon when you have many consumers. Payments are booked to the same debtor as the invoice, so open items in DATEV clear per customer. Assigned numbers stay stable and can be adjusted to an existing DATEV setup. The matching debtor master data (name, address, VAT ID (USt-IdNr.)) is available as an EXTF file (data category 16) for download, in the app and in the tax firm's client access.

Finalization and checksum

A newly created export starts as a draft with a preview and a debit/credit check. The owner and the tax advisor role may finalize it. After that, the export is immutable: the file is rewritten with finalization flag 1, and every download is byte-identical and checked against the stored SHA-256 checksum. If a linked document can no longer be rendered for a finalized export, Rechnungskit does not create a package with a gap. Instead, the export page shows the missing documents with invoice number and GUID and offers a retry.

Access for your tax advisor

Your tax advisor gets their own client access: download exports and DATEV packages, collect debtor master data, and maintain the chart of accounts, numbers and account mappings themselves, with a before-and-after log for every change. For tax firms with several clients, there is the batch run, which bundles all clients for a month or quarter into one ZIP, and an automatic run that creates the drafts for the previous month on a set day each month. Nothing is ever finalized automatically.

What the export cannot do, we say openly: no direct online transfer to DATEV (XML-Schnittstelle online, data service), no document images in the payment export, no accounting currency other than the euro. And the preset accounts are starting values for your tax advisor to review, not tax advice.