this is going to be about a Germany specific problem.
In Germany, we have a company called DATEV. They produce software. They are the defacto monopolist in the realm of finance software because as far as I know nearly every (or every?) tax consultant is using their software. So it is important, if you want to use a tax consultant, to somehow get the data from inside InvoiceNinja to the tax consultant. Because I already did a lot of work of digitalizing data and don’t want to pay them to redo that work for no reason.
DATEV offers various possibilities to transmit data to their products.
A) Online-APIs. Only available for money, so would have to be offered via InvoiceNinja. Unlikely to happen in my opinion.
B) CSV: Can be done offline, can transmit everything required. BUT can’t import documents. Tax Consultant wants to double-check my bookings with the documents. Can’t do that if they are not attached.
C) XML: Can transmit required data AND corresponding documents. Can NOT be done offline. Needs to be uploaded to DATEV servers to then be downloaded by the tax consultant. This service requires a separate subscription. Contract runs at least a year and costs 10-12 € a month. It also includes a lot of other stuff that you may or may not find useful (I don’t). A version of the subscription to only be able to upload data is not available.
I am quite sure about this information, because of research in the way of mailing and speaking to their support and sales team.
Summarizing. I know of no way to transmit my data to my tax consultant without either paying ridiculous amounts of money (120€ per year? For data transmission???) or switch away from InvoiceNinja to a software product that offers DATEV integration.
I have written the German antitrust agency. They don’t see a reason to get active here which I find very… disappointing because this is clearly an issue for the free market.
So my question - does anyone else has these problems? Did you solve them? How?
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Since I currently use Invoice Ninja only for my freelancing work alongside my studies, I can do my taxes alone without a tax advisor.
And in the price details (DATEV Preisliste für Unternehmen), it says: “DATEV Unternehmen online can be used for free. When setting up a client base, additional costs for DATEV Belege online per client base arise (see DATEV price list under DATEV Belege online, Art.-Nr. 95157).” I understand it as your tax advisor pays for the submitted documents, or am I completely lost?
To upload this you need Unternehmen Online + (maybe) Belege online.
DATEVconnect seems to be a way to use their APIs without their servers but by doing it locally… I can’t grasp how much work that would be to do. Plus I would need to install a program on the device of my tax advisor, which may or may not be possible/allowed. I mean that would require that I export my data out of invoice ninja, build a new program that communicates with Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen, install that on the PC of the tax advisor and use it to upload my data… That sounds quite complicated.
I believe it is already possible in Invoice Ninja, as they support the German e-invoice standard.
There is also the DATEV connect online interface, which is based on the XML online interface, if I understand correctly. The question here is whether, as a small business/sole proprietorship, you can enter into a contract with DATEV to enable authentication. Then, the Invoice Ninja community could take over the development, similar to what has been done with Stripe, Mollie, or GoCardless/Nordigen. You would then register your instance with DATEV.
I just took a closer look at the following YouTube channel. They’ve created several videos on this topic and often illustrate it with examples. You probably already know it since you came across it during your research.
The XML archive required by DATEV is entirely different from the e-invoice stuff.
It’s basically a zipped folder of all PDFs for your income and expenses and an XML file that lists all transactions and names the corresponding PDF for each transaction.
Regarding DATEV connect online. That doesn’t exist anymore apparently DATEVconnect online umbenannt – DATEV magazin
What would be needed, if you wanted to do this via the internet, would be to use their Online APIs Online APIs | DATEV Developer Portal
I believe the appropriate API for my use case would be accounting:documents accounting:documents - DATEV Developer Portal | DATEV Developer Portal.
BUT the problem again is that these APIs are, as far as I understood, intended to transmit data to Unternehmen online. Which is a separate service with separate costs that have to be paid by the customer (me). I do not see an API intended for direct transmission to Kanzlei-Rechnungswesen.
I had a (brief) look at the youtube channel you linked but couldn’t find anything of interest for my problem to be honest. Did you have a specific video in mind?
To repeat - I do know what DATEV offers as a path for me to get my invoice data to my tax consultant but I want to avoid paying an additional 120€ per year just for transmitting data.
Thanks for clarifying. I didn’t know that… Why make it simple if I can complicate it?
To be honest, I haven’t looked at DATEV for over 2 years because it’s not working great with Mac if you want to use their software. It was about the DATEV Connect Online, but if they closed that API, we can’t use it anymore.
Right, every other API wants the paid subscription level, Unternehmen Online.
That would be the Unternehmen Online basic account, I think. But if you use another service, most of them will also require that account, or if not, they charge around the same for that connection.
Question: Do they have a “Local” Installation, then you could send them the data via a VPN connection via the API. But that would mean they would give you access to all other Mandates if I understand that correctly.
Nope, you won’t be the only one. I hope it will simplify things a bit here. I will soon finish my studies, and when I start to have more and more clients, I’ll need to find a tax consultant, and unfortunately, DATEV is the standard in 95% of cases.
Certainly, I would appreciate it if you could keep us updated. I’ll take a closer look over the weekend and may write to DATEV Support for further clarification if needed.
Datev is the best-known provider in germany, but there are many alternative software providers that do the same. Incidentally, most tax consultants are also members of the registered cooperative Datev (DATEV eingetragenen Genossenschaft), so they rarely know anything else.
I use the software DATEV Unternehmen Online exclusively in the browser (Linux user), but I have also set up the invoice upload via email. So you only need to send the outgoing invoices in addition to the customers email to your individual Datev outgoing invoice email address (via BCC). You do not need an API for this.
You can easily set up an individual emails for incoming and outgoing invoices in the Datev company online portal. see https://apps.datev.de/help-center/documents/1007550
The few bucks for the service are worth it, as your bank account is linked directly to your customers and supplier invoices and payments from your suppliers can be made automatically and all receipts are posted to the appropriate account turnover.
For me, the monthly trip by car to the tax consultant to drop off the files would be more expensive than simply uploading the receipts in the browser or forwarding them by email.
The tax consultant can then access the account and the invoices directly and can process them easily in the office accounting system (Kanzlei Rechnungswesen). This saves costs. You can then also download the generated BWAs and payslips online in a secure form.
Well great if it is saving costs for you. For me it is only adding cost and by a tremendous amount for very little in return… I want to transmit my stuff once a year. The data could be transmitted completely by CSV and some PDFs. But their software makes it impossible to do a local import of a CSV/XML/JSON/whatever WITH linked PDFs. I think it’s bullshit to take money for wanting to import data into their programs. Data that I already have and that is preprocessed.
What about buying yourself some sort of software like Taxman/QuickSteuer for 20-40 Bucks and forget about the tax consultant? Sounds like microbusiness below 22k€ sales tax exemption limit.
Well I did start with that approach but at one point I realised that my business is a) quite complicated in terms of various income sources and b) I forget all the tax stuff every year and have to relearn it. My business is at ~40k per year at the moment.
So yeah, tax office could be nice. But of course I want to keep the costs down. And giving DATEV money for providing me basically nothing is rubbing me the wrong way.
For anyone looking for a solution to do a custom API integration with DATEV, I think this thread sums it up pretty well: https://www.datev-community.de/t5/Unternehmen-online/Dokumente-per-API-hochladen-eigene-ID-vergeben/td-p/388363#_=_
Basically in addition to DATEV Unternehmen Online you have to pay 1500 EUR for the API integration and have to get it approved in 4 hour workshop by DATEV in order to get a proper API key. Before you can test an integration with a sandbox, but not with a live system. It is all explained and clarified in this thread in German, translate it with your browser if thats not your language I guess.
This post quite from madduck in the thread sums it up well:
To be honest, the situation sucks. I can’t avoid the €1,500 setup fee including 4 “compulsory hours”. In the hours I have to get advice, have to demonstrate my software and let them solve tasks. Otherwise I won’t get access to the interface. Is it so badly programmed that you have to make such a preselection or set up such hurdles? Every fart and every website today has a REST API. Only DATEV not, they first need a 35-page contract and all this egg dance. Choking.
I am assuming the best approach considering this, is to create a XML document that is compatible with the DATEV format and then batch import the XML into DUO (Datev Unternehmen Online) or to see how well the standard export works in Invoice Ninja with DUO. I am about to get DUO since my new tax consultant is using it (I am waiting for an activation letter, DATEV is really its own world stuck in the 90s, I guess that has to do with their monopoly status, similar to Intuit in the US) and I am using Invoice Ninja to generate my invoices for a SaaS as well as Project invoices.
Anyhow, if anyone has useful information to share how to create a DATEV XML from Invoice Ninja, I’d appreciate it. Or does someone use the standard exports to import into DUO?
The other approaches are to use the email service (send the Invoices via email to DUO) or to use a Service such as getMyInvoices at additional cost.
Or, one could write an integration, test it in the sandbox and collect the money getting the api integration verified via crowdfunding. If there are enough people who need this, I am sure a campaign would bring together enough cash to get this done. I am not sure though if a open source integration is compatible with their license agreement or if the integration can only be used by a single domain, since that would invalidate the solution for self hosting. I am assuming there are some of these limitations, since I have not seen any open source integrations readily available.
No Update from end. I never got a working DATEV export going. Ended up using a different Solution. Was just not worth the time needed to figure it out and get a somehwta automated workflow going.
After several months of using Invoice Ninja in my invoicing and bookkeeping workflow for a SaaS and software development business, I decided to move away from it entirely. While I had integrated it into my system using the API and found it effective in many ways, I ultimately chose to switch to Lexware Office for invoicing and bookkeeping, leveraging their API for seamless integration.
This shift reflects a change in approach, as I am now relying on a proprietary SaaS for bookkeeping. However, it has significantly reduced my monthly bookkeeping effort and allowed me to better prepare my books for my bookkeeper, leading to additional savings in billable hours.
That said, I still think Invoice Ninja is an excellent invoicing solution. Its Laravel-based, self-hosted setup makes it highly flexible and easy to integrate, and their support and development community is outstanding. Any API issues I encountered were resolved quickly, and some of my feature requests were even implemented.
For my specific use case, however—particularly with German bookkeeping requirements—it was not the ideal solution. While Invoice Ninja excels in many areas, Lexware Office ultimately better aligns with my needs.
