What your Steuerberater means by \"send me the DATEV\
A plain explanation of what a DATEV export is, what has to be in it, and why sending a CSV instead costs your accountant an afternoon every month.
If you run a business in Germany, at some point your Steuerberater will ask for "die DATEV" and assume you know what that means. This is what it means.
What DATEV is
DATEV eG is a co-operative owned by German tax advisers, and its software is what a very large share of Steuerberater actually work in. When yours asks for a DATEV export, they are asking for a file their system can import directly, so that your transactions arrive as bookkeeping entries rather than as something they retype.
The relevant format is usually DATEV-Format (EXTF) — a CSV with a fixed header line and a fixed column order. It is not "a CSV". The header identifies the format version, the consultant number (Beraternummer), the client number (Mandantennummer) and the financial year, and the columns have to be in the order the importer expects.
What has to be in it
At minimum, per entry:
- Umsatz — the amount, and whether it is debit or credit (Soll/Haben)
- Konto and Gegenkonto — the account and contra-account, in your chart of
accounts (SKR 03 or SKR 04; your Steuerberater will tell you which)
- Belegdatum — the document date
- Belegfeld 1 — the document reference, so an entry can be traced to an invoice
- Buchungstext — what it was
- BU-Schlüssel where the VAT treatment is not the default for that account
The two that cause the most trouble are the chart of accounts and the BU-Schlüssel. Using SKR 03 numbers when your advisor works in SKR 04 produces a file that imports cleanly and is entirely wrong, which is worse than one that fails.
Why a generic CSV is not a substitute
A generic export contains the same information in a different shape. Your accountant then has to map columns, decide which of your categories corresponds to which account, and handle the VAT keys by hand — every month, and in a way that has to stay consistent with last month.
That mapping is an afternoon the first time and an hour every month after. It is also where errors come from, because it is a manual step repeated under time pressure.
What to check before the first export
- Ask which chart of accounts they use — SKR 03 or SKR 04. Do not guess.
- Get the Beraternummer and Mandantennummer from them. The file needs both.
- Agree the financial year start. Usually January, not always.
- Send one month first and ask them to import it into a test client before you rely
on it.
- Agree how the documents travel. The ledger is not enough on its own — they need
the invoice PDFs, and they need to be able to get from an entry to its document.
A note on e-invoicing
Separately from the DATEV question, Germany has been phasing in mandatory structured e-invoicing for domestic B2B. Since 1 January 2025 businesses have had to be able to receive structured e-invoices — XRechnung or ZUGFeRD — and the obligation to issue them phases in afterwards, with the threshold depending on turnover.
The two things are related but not the same: an e-invoice is how the invoice reaches your customer, and the DATEV export is how your books reach your advisor. You need both, and the dates and thresholds for the e-invoicing obligation are exactly the sort of thing to confirm with your Steuerberater rather than with an article.
The VAT rates BizBoard applies for Germany are the standard 19% and reduced 7% set out
in Umsatzsteuergesetz (UStG) § 12.
They are public facts; how they apply to your business is not, and we have not had
Germany's detailed rules reviewed by a paid local expert.
BizBoard exports DATEV for Germany, FEC for France and ABRA Flexi or Pohoda for Czechia, with the invoice PDFs alongside the ledger, from a free login for your accountant. See what your accountant gets.