How do I pass the hours to the tax adviser?

The DATEV payroll file

Management, HR and accounting see the DATEV payroll export button. At the first export the dialog asks in three steps for everything the accountant specifies and remembers it. From the second month on it opens at the people step, and one click downloads the file.

1. Month and accountant: choose the month, your accountant's payroll program (file for DATEV LODAS or file for DATEV Lohn und Gehalt), plus the consultant number and client number. Your accountant gives you both.
2. Values: tick what is handed over, that is working hours, overtime of the month, night, Sunday and holiday hours, vacation days or sick days, and enter your accountant's wage type for each value. By default working hours go out only for staff paid by the hour.
3. People: if someone has no DATEV personnel number, you enter it here. Then download the file and give it to your accountant.

Without DATEV: the time account in four steps

The handover itself is the shortest part. The work sits in the first step, and after the first month that is routine.

1. Close the month. Set the closing lock to the last day of the month, after which nothing in the figures moves.
2. Open the time account, set the period to the month and filter by person or department where needed.
3. Export as Excel or PDF. Anyone needing the same cut every month saves the filter combination under a name and loads it next time.
4. Give the file to the tax firm, by email or through their client portal. Where needed, put the absence report on holiday and sickness alongside it.

What the file contains

The time account sets the target hours from the working-time model against the actual time recorded and shows the balance. The public holidays of the relevant federal state and the approved absences are already factored into the target hours, and employment periods limit them: anyone who joined during the month has no target for the days before that.

If somebody changes working-time model mid-period, the report calculates with the model that applied on each day. A retrospective report therefore delivers the same value as at the time.

The absence report is the second report. It lists holiday and sickness per person and period, with filters by person and department, and is tailored to payroll.

What else can be exported

Eighteen object types are available for export, depending on the question. For the tax firm these four are usually what is meant.

Who may export

The permission to export is not maintained separately but derived from the page the report sits on. Anyone allowed to see the absence report may also export it, so an extension of rights for supervisors or department managers takes effect in the export without further action. A second, manually maintained role table is deliberately absent; it would be the place where the two diverge.

The scope follows the same logic. For reports that everyone may see for themselves, the file contains only their own rows, unless the role is expressly allowed to see the whole business. The narrowing happens in the query and not as a post-filter on the finished result.

Why it is closed beforehand

Once the file is with the tax firm, nothing in the figures may change silently. The closing lock with a fixed date ensures that: everything on or before that day is locked, with no case-by-case release and no role that gets around it.

Conversely that means open change requests, clarification cases from the terminal and unconfirmed suggested bookings belong before the closing, not after it. After that the period is shut.

All data at once

Alongside the individual reports there is the full data export. Management orders it, a background job pulls the data, writes CSV files and packs them into an archive, and an email reports that it is ready. The download runs through a time-limited link whose expiry is shown on the order.

That is the route for a system change or a request covering the entire holdings, not the route for the monthly handover. The time account is enough for that.