This article explains how to collaborate with a tax advisor through an external profile in Personio.

How to collaborate with a tax advisor in Personio

To streamline communication with your tax advisor or payroll department, you can create a dedicated Employee profile for them in Personio and grant them relevant permissions. This allows them to independently access relevant and up-to-date payroll information directly from the system.

Notice External employees, such as your tax advisor, are included in your billing plan and count toward your subscription headcount. They will also appear in your organizational chart, ensuring a clear overview of everyone connected to your company.

Add a new employee with an external profile

To grant your tax advisor or payroll accountant access to payroll information, you can create an external Employee profile in Personio. To do this, you need to:

• Set up a new Employee profile in Personio following these steps.

• Ensure you assign the Employment Type as External to clearly differentiate the tax advisor from internal employees in the system.

Create a new employee Role for the external profile

Permission Area	Details
Payroll Section	Grant view rights to allow access to payroll information and the ability to download generated exports. Administration and approval remain internal. If multiple legal entities exist, ensure permissions are granted for each entity.
Document Categories	Assign view rights for: Work Contracts (employment contract details) Absence Certificates (health insurance reporting) Study Documentation (relevant employee information)
Payroll Documents	Provide viewing rights for the Payroll document category to enable document downloads.
Employee Data Sections	View rights for sections containing attributes relevant to preliminary payroll.
Import Documents	Activate to allow bulk uploads of payslips and other documents. Access to imported files depends on document permissions.
Absences	Assign viewing rights for all absence types relevant to payroll, such as paid vacation and sickness.

 

Create another employee role for the external payroll accountant. This role receives Viewing rights for the Payroll section, allowing the owner of the role to access information and download already generated exports. The administration of preliminary payroll and its monthly approval will continue to be carried out by a responsible internal employee. If you have more than one legal entity, grant the permissions for each legal entity.

Furthermore, so that everything runs smoothly, the external payroll accountant role should also include viewing rights for the Work contracts, Absence certificates and Study documentation document categories, as the documents stored there contain important information on the employment contract and health insurance reporting.

You should assign viewing rights to the Payroll document category so that the external payroll accountant can download documents from this category, as shown in the screenshot below.

Additionally, you should assign the external payroll accountant viewing rights for the individual Sections of the employee data that contain attributes included in the Preliminary payroll. 

Once the Import documents section of this employee role has been activated, the external payroll accountant will be able to import payslips and other relevant documents for all employees by using the bulk upload function. However, access to the imported files is determined according to the permissions defined for the documents section.

You should also give the external payroll accountant viewing rights for all absence types that are relevant to payroll (for example, paid vacation, sickness, etc.) in the Absences section.

You can find a detailed overview of permissions here.

 

Separate Permissions for the External Payroll Accountant Role

In order to maintain a strict separation between the external payroll accountant and your internal employees or the All employees system role, you will need to adjust the All employees role accordingly and create two new Employee roles.

Carry out the following steps to achieve this:

1. Adjust the All employees system role: Remove all the rights associated with the All employees system role, because this role acts as a base role and is thus automatically assigned by default to every active employee, internal and external.
2. Create a new role for internal employees: Create a new employee role called, for example, All internal employees. Going forward, this role should exist alongside the All employees system role and include all internal employees. Since the All internal employees role replaces the system role, grant this role the permissions that internal employees should receive in your account. Remember to always assign newly created employees to this role since this will no longer be done automatically, as it was with the system role. You can find out how to configure employee roles here.

 

 

Creating Reminders

You have the option to create reminders for the external payroll accountant, for example of upcoming termination dates or absences. These reminders can be individually customized to match your requirements.

This article explains how you can configure one-time and recurring reminders in Personio.

 

Security Settings

To ensure maximum security, you can set up 2-factor authentication for the external payroll accountant's login, if they are not logging in via a Google account. This would mean that all employees in this role would have to complete an additional authentication step using a Google Authenticator token when logging in.

German customers who use the DATEV-integration, can create a DATEV export in Personio that can then be imported directly into DATEV. You can find further information on this topic here.