The eAU (electronic certificate of incapacity to work) is a digital version of the standard paper sick certificate, which doctors are issuing since January 1st 2023 to all employees who are publicly insured in Germany.

The goal of the new electronic sick certificate is that employees themselves no longer need to upload any paper sick certificate into their HR platform. The new electronic certificate is sent directly from the employees' doctor to the employees' health insurance.

Once the certificate is sent to the employees' health insurance, you must  retrieve it by following one of the processes below, depending on whether your company has the DATEV integration enabled or not. If your company has Personio Payroll enabled, refer to the dedicated article on the topic instead.

Before you start

The eAU is only available for employees with statutory or another non-private type of health insurance. Employees with private health insurance must upload their medical certificate manually into their employee profile Time off tab.

To follow the steps in this article, you need the permissions to use the DATEV integration outlined in this article.

Manual retrieval of the eAU certificate (No DATEV integration enabled)

If you are a Germany-based Personio customer and do not have the DATEV integration set up, you must retrieve your employee's electronic sick certificates manually.

You can do so by either retrieving the electronic sick certificates yourself, or by outsourcing that to your tax advisor.

Note:
We don't recommend creating two separate time off types as a workaround, as it will add complexity when it comes to searching and maintenance work. 

Retrieve the electronic sick certificates yourself (through either SV-Meldeportal or external payroll tool)

You can retrieve the electronic certificate yourself on a weekly or monthly basis. You will have to generate a custom report to get an overview by filtering Germany-based and publicly insured employees.

1. Instruct your employees to continue uploading the standard paper version of the sick certificate without the diagnosis (if they are still provided with it) when requesting a “Sickness” time off type in Personio. 
2. Create a legacy custom report using the Classic Builder to identify which employees you need to retrieve the electronic sick certificate from. Use the following report configuration:
   1. In Specify report details, select Type of report > Timeframe and when selecting the Date of report, we suggest using a timeframe such as Month or Week. Next, select the following attributes: Type of health insurance and Workplace. Select also the relevant time off type under Collections: Time off types (6 columns) to display the Certificate status attribute
   2.  In Set up conditions, filter the Germany-based employees who are publicly insured via both the Workplace and the Insurance type attribute.
   3. Click Create report to generate the report and see all the employees with a Pending certificate status. Those employees are the ones you need to request an electronic sick certificate for.
      
3. Log in to either SV-Meldeportal or to your external payroll tool (DATEV, Sage, etc.).
4. Create a request for the electronic sick certificate from the filtered employees. If your payroll tool cannot request electronic certificates, you will need to use SV-Meldeportal instead.
   
5. After some time (anywhere between a few minutes and 2 weeks), you will receive an email from SV-Meldeportal or your payroll tool to inform you that the electronic sick certificates have been successfully retrieved.
   

   Note:
   If the electronic sick certificates do not cover the entire employee's time off period, you can request an additional electronic sick certificate for that employee.

6. Download the electronic sick certificates.
7. Go to Employee Profile > Time off, click on the sick time off period registered by the employee and upload the eAU to the respective time off period.
8. Set the documents' status as Approved and click Update.

   Note:
   Currently, only one document can be linked to a time off period. If other documents have been uploaded previously, you will find them under Documents > Time off certificates. 

Your tax advisor retrieves the electronic sick certificates on your behalf 

In order for your tax advisor to retrieve the electronic sick certificates on your behalf, you will need to provide them with information about which employees were sick and when. The easiest way to do so is to create a custom report on a weekly or monthly basis and send it to them.

So, the process is very similar to the previous process where you manually retrieve the electronic sick certificate yourself:

1. We recommend that you instruct your employees to still upload the standard paper version of the sick certificate without the diagnosis (if they are provided with one) when requesting a Sickness time off type in Personio.
2. Create a legacy custom report using the Classic Builder to identify which employees your tax advisor needs to retrieve the electronic sick certificate from. Use the following report configuration:
   
   1. In Specify report details, select Type of report > Timeframe and when selecting the Date of report, we suggest using a timeframe such as Month or Week. Next, select the following attributes: Type of health insurance and Workplace. Select also the relevant time off type under Collections: Time off types (6 columns) to display the Certificate status attribute.
   2. In Set up conditions, filter the Germany-based employees who are publicly insured via both the Workplace and the Insurance type attribute.
   3. Click Create report to generate the report and see all the employees with a Pending certificate status. Those employees are the ones you need to request an electronic sick certificate for.
3. Click Export to export the custom report and download it to your PC.
4. Forward the custom report to your tax advisor.
5. The tax advisor will then request the electronic sick certificates for the relevant employees.
6. After some time, your tax advisor will receive an email from SV-Meldeportal or their payroll tool, to inform them that the electronic sick certificates have been successfully retrieved.
7. Your tax advisor can then forward you the electronic sick certificates so that you upload the electronic sick certificate into the time off request (see process above), or they can do it themselves if they have access to your Personio account.

Automatic retrieval of the eAU certificate (DATEV integration enabled)

If you are a Germany-based Personio customer and have the DATEV integration set up, you can retrieve your employee's electronic sick certificates automatically. 

This means that, whenever a sick leave is requested, the eAU is automatically retrieved from the employees' health insurance by Personio via the DATEV integration and saved in Personio. The employee and also the HR manager (if they have been set as an approver in the approval workflow) are informed every time its status is updated.

To fully automate the retrieval of the eAU certificate, you need to first set up the automatic eAU retrieval via the DATEV integration.