This article explains how to import your employees' payslips and other documents that have been created in DATEV LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt into Personio via the Lohnauswertungsdatenservice and how to process them from there.

Retrieve Documents from DATEV in Personio

Once you have authorized and set up the Lohnauswertungsdatenservice, you can retrieve selected documents in Payroll. This involves the following steps:

1. Making documents available in DATEV
   You will only be able to retrieve documents that your payroll accountant has released in DATEV LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt. For details on how this works, see the DATEV Hilfe-Center articles Lohnauswertungsdatenservice als Online-API-Schnittstelle der Personalwirtschaft nutzen (Using the Lohnauswertungsdatenservice as an Online API Interface in HR) and Informationen zur Rechtevergabe für die Nutzung des Lohnauswertungsdatenservice (Granting Access Rights for Using the Lohnauswertungsdatenservice).
   
   

   Note: When the payroll is completed in DATEV, a time period for potential adjustments can be specified. It it is possible that documents can only be retrieved after that period has expired.

2. Retrieve documents in Personio
   As soon as documents are available for retrieval in DATEV, you can view them within the preliminary payroll in Personio by clicking on Retrieve documents. In this step, the employee-related documents that you have selected are assigned to the respective employees via the DATEV Personalnummer.
   
   
   
   

   Note: Employee-related documents are assigned based on the DATEV-Personalnummer of the respective employees. You should therefore check the existing access rights for employee roles as well as approval processes, to avoid any unexpected changes. 

   Note: In addition to the attribute DATEV-Personalnummer, make sure that the attribute Consider in German payroll is marked Yes.

3. Bulk downloading documents
   Click on Documents to download employee-related documents into a .zip file. This file will contain all the retrieved documents in PDF format. Employer-related documents can be downloaded directly as PDF files via the Employer tab.
   
   

   Note: All available documents within a DATEV tenant are included, regardless of whether they have been assigned to an employee according to their Personalnummer, or whether employees are distributed between companies in Personio (with the same Tenant ID).

4. Individual document preview
   After the documents have been successfully retrieved, you can preview them for individual employees in the respective columns. To do this, click on the grey button View Documents.
5. Distributing documents to employees
   Distribute the imported documents directly to your employees' document areas. To do this, click on Distribute documents.
   
   
   
   

   Note: Only the system category Payroll may be used for the distribution of employee-related documents. Accordingly, only employees with viewing rights for that document category will be able to see their payslips.

Deleting Documents

Reset document retrieval and distribution

In some cases it may be useful to remove all documents transferred in a month. To reset all documents for a month from both the payroll and from the documents in individual employee profiles, proceed as follows:

1. Go to Payroll.
2. Click on the options button with the three dots in the top right corner and select Undo document retrieval/distribution.

   

3. Confirm the removal of the documents by clicking on Reset.

Note: Once confirmed, all documents of the respective month are removed from the Payroll as well as the Documents tab of the employee profile. Previews of the documents are no longer available.

Remove a document type for one month

Documents that have been imported from DATEV via the Lohnauswertungsdatenservice are stored in Payroll > Documents for the respective month. If you would like to delete imported documents, you can do this for all documents of the same document type, for example "A1-Bescheinigung," within a payroll month.

This involves the following steps:

1. Go to Payroll and click on Documents.

   

2. Select the document type you would like to delete and then click on the trash can icon on the right.
3. Confirm the deletion by clicking on Delete document.

Note: By confirming the deletion of a document type, all documents of this type for the respective month are removed from the Payroll and from the Documents tab of the employee profiles. Previews of the documents are no longer available.

Security Mechanisms and Validations for Documents 

Various security mechanisms have been set up to prevent confidential documents from being assigned incorrectly or from being accessible in the wrong place. You can identify the type of problem from error messages which carry an exclamation point and, in payroll accounting, warnings with a warning triangle. 

Note: If there is an error message, you will not be able to complete the payroll unless the error has been resolved. Warnings will inform you about any missing data, such as employee documents that could not be transferred from DATEV. You will then be able to decide whether you want to resolve the error or continue with your process. For more details about this error, see our troubleshooting article.

Examples of error messages for duplicated personnel numbers and changes to employee data that are relevant to how data is assigned: