DATEV eG is a software house and IT service provider for tax consultants, auditors and lawyers, but also for their clients. Most tax consultants and auditors in Germany use DATEV software. As an entrepreneur in Germany, you can hardly ignore DATEV when it comes to tax and accounting.

"DATEV Unternehmen online" is the DATEV cloud solution for entrepreneurs. Here, receipts can be uploaded and shared with the tax advisor. Even if you as an entrepreneur do not use the product directly and do not have access to it, it is very likely that your tax advisor uses the product and your company is managed there as a client.

If you now create invoices on ZEIT.IO, sooner or later these invoices should also end up at DATEV. As long as there are only a few invoices per month, you can upload them manually to "DATEV Unternehmen online". Or you can send the invoice to your tax advisor via email and they will then upload it to DATEV. You can do it that way, but it has nothing to do with automation and digitization!

Now there is a possibility to connect your DATEV account with ZEIT.IO. When this connection is established, every invoice that is completed in ZEIT.IO is also automatically sent to DATEV. These 4 steps are necessary for this connection:

The order of these steps is very important!

"DATEV Unternehmen online" offers a way to automatically send the documents to DATEV via the 'Upload Mail' function and to save them there. Here is a video tutorial that shows how 'DATEV Upload Mail' can be configured in DATEV. The steps are described again below.

If you are logged into DATEV then click on "Applications" in the top right corner and then on "Master Data" or "Stammdaten".

Next, you'll see a page similar to this one:

At the top right you can see your DATEV client ID. Please copy the ID and open the ZEIT.IO page in a second window. Navigate to your ZEIT.IO organization to settings and then to "DATEV Upload Mail". Enter your DATEV mandate ID here and do not click the "Save" button yet.

Now switch back to "DATEV Unternehmen Online" and click on "Applications" in the top right corner and then on "Documents" ("Belege" in German).

Next, click the arrow on the right to expand the menu.

... and then on the right on "Master data" ("Stammdaten" in German).

Then on "Upload Mail" and then on "Configure" ("Konfigurieren" in German).

On the following page you can now see the configuration for Upload Mail. Here you can see a randomly generated e-mail address which looks like this "<RANDOM-VALUE>@uploadmail.datev.de". This is your DATEV target email address for incoming invoices! If you send receipts to this email address, the receipts will automatically end up in your DATEV account. Click on "Add document type" and add another DATEV target e-mail address for outgoing invoices. It should look something like this:

Now copy the DATEV target e-mail addresses and switch back to ZEIT.IO. Now enter the DATEV target e-mail addresses in ZEIT.IO. Should then look something like this:

Also enter a "Forward E-Mail" address. The forward email is your own email address or an email address from your company. When ZEIT.IO receives e-mails for your DATEV account, these e-mails are forwarded to the "Forward E-Mail" address. When you have filled in all fields, please click on "Save".

Now switch back to DATEV, to the "Upload Mail - Settings" page:

In the lower area you will see "Authorized senders" ("Absender hinzufügen" in German). Here you can enter email addresses that are authorized to send receipts to your DATEV account. Here it is very important that you put the e-mail address zeit@zeit.io on the list of "authorized senders"! Only then can ZEIT.IO automatically send your invoices to DATEV.

After you have successfully deposited the email address "zeit@zeit.io" with DATEV, you will receive a confirmation email from ZEIT.IO. The email will look something like this:

Please click on the green button "Absenderadresse bestätigen" ("Confirm sender address") in the Email!
This completes the configuration and establishes the connection to DATEV!

If you now create and finalize an invoice on ZEIT.IO, the PDF invoice is automatically sent to DATEV outgoing invoices. Thus the process is completely automated. You no longer have to download PDF invoices and manually upload them to DATEV. This manual step is completely eliminated!

If you have created and finalized invoices before DATEV integration, you can still explicitly send these invoices to DATEV. In the invoice detail view, there is now a new action "Send to DATEV outgoing invoice" on the far right under the actions.

This allows you to explicitly send a finalized invoice to DATEV at any time.

In the audit logs of an invoice, you can also see when the invoice was sent to DATEV. Here's an example:

Once the DATEV integration has been set up, you don't have to do anything else. Every invoice that you create and finalize on ZEIT.IO automatically ends up in your DATEV account. The whole thing happens in real time, without delay. The process is completely automated and that way you have more time for the really important things in life.