What does eAU stand for? 

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 will be sent directly from the employees' doctor to the employees' health insurance, and the company will simply need to request it from the employees' health insurance.

Furthermore, later this year, we will release a new Personio feature for the Datev integration that will automatically retrieve the employees' electronic sick certificates from the employees' health insurance, so that no manual effort is required from your side.

However, from January 1st 2023 until the new feature goes live, you will still need to retrieve your employee's electronic sick certificates manually even if you have the DATEV integration. You can do so by following one of the processes below. 

Note
The new feature for the automatic retrieval of the electronic sick certificates will only be available for Germany-based Personio customers who also have the DATEV integration set up. 

Note
We don't recommend creating two separate absence 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.net 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" absence type in Personio. 
2. Go to Reports > Custom reports and create a custom report to check which employees you need to retrieve the electronic sick certificate from:
   ▸ In Specify report details, create the following table columns: Sick periods, Days with certificate, Type of health insurance and Office. Select Type of report > Timeframe and when selecting the Date of report, we suggest using a timeframe such as Month or Week.
   ▸ In Set up conditions, filter the Germany-based employees who are publicly insured via both the Office and the Insurance type attribute.
   ▸ Click Create report to see all the employees you need to request an electronic sick certificate for.
   
3. Log in to either sv.net 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.net instead.
   
5. After some time (anywhere between a few minutes and 2 weeks), you will receive an email from sv.net 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 absence period, you can request an additional electronic sick certificate for that employee.

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

   Note
   At the moment, only one document can be linked to an absence period. If other documents have been uploaded previously, you will find them under Documents > Absence 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 absence type in Personio.
2. Go to Reports > Custom reports and create a custom report to check which employees your tax advisor needs to retrieve the electronic sick certificate from:
   ▸ In Specify report details, create the following table columns: Sick periods, Days with certificate,Type of health insurance and Office. Select Type of report > Timeframe and when selecting the Date of report, we suggest using a timeframe such as Month or Week.
   ▸ In Set up conditions, filter the Germany-based employees who are publicly insured via both the Office and the Insurance type attribute.
   ▸ Click Create report to see all the employees your tax advisor 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.net 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 absence request (see process above), or they can do it themselves if they have access to your Personio account.