Payroll integration
SAP SuccessFactors to DATEV integration: Employee Central changes for the German tax adviser
With an integration between SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and DATEV, new German employees, contract changes, pay components, one-off payments and departures go to LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt with their effective date. The tax adviser takes them over in DATEV and keeps control of the German payroll run.
What the integration does
Organisations that use Employee Central worldwide and have German payroll processed by a tax adviser in DATEV usually send a report from SuccessFactors every month. The office retypes it, and a pay change HR entered with an effective date next month is not in a report run today.
- KoppelHet gets a technical user in SuccessFactors with OAuth and permissions on the German legal entity only.
- KoppelHet fetches changed employments, jobs and pay components, including changes with a future effective date.
- Pay components are converted through a lookup table to the tax adviser's wage types; one-off payments become movements in the month of payment.
- The delivery goes through the DATEV data centre to the tax adviser's payroll program, who takes it over.
- Before the cut-off KoppelHet reports which pay components have no wage type.
What to watch for with SAP SuccessFactors and DATEV
- An OData query to Employee Central only returns the records valid today by default. A pay rise from the first of next month is therefore only seen by an integration on that day. KoppelHet also requests future records with fromDate and toDate, so the tax adviser has the change in time for the right month.
- Recurring pay components have their own frequency in Employee Central, for example yearly or monthly. DATEV works with a fixed monthly amount per wage type. KoppelHet converts each component to the monthly amount and records per component which of the tax adviser's wage types it lands on.
- One-off payments sit in Employee Central as separate records with a pay date. KoppelHet places them as a movement in the DATEV month of that pay date, not in the month HR entered them. A bonus entered in March for payment in April therefore lands in April.
- Employee Central often holds every country of a group. KoppelHet only reads employments with the German legal entity in the job data, and the technical user may see nothing else, so no salary of a colleague outside Germany reaches the tax adviser.
- SAP marks basic authentication for the SuccessFactors APIs as deprecated. KoppelHet signs in with OAuth 2.0 and a SAML assertion, so the German delivery does not stop when SAP switches off the old sign-in.
- In July 2025 DATEV launched the Lohnaustauschdatenservice, which works in both directions. The first vendors to build it in were HR WORKS, taxmaro and Factorial; SAP was not among them. For SuccessFactors there is therefore no ready-made route from either vendor, and KoppelHet builds the delivery.
- SAP also sells its own payroll with Employee Central Payroll. This integration is for organisations that keep German payroll with their tax adviser in DATEV; KoppelHet does not touch Employee Central Payroll.
How we build and run it
- The integration runs on the KoppelHet platform, hosted in a data centre in the EU.
- Every sync and every error is visible in the functional log; on an error your administrator is notified.
- A change that cannot go through is not half-applied but queued for another attempt.
- KoppelHet is ISO 27001 certified. Data travels encrypted and stays on the platform no longer than needed.
- After go-live we manage the integration and adjust it when your process changes.
- The integration fits next to your existing integration layer. Only the fields in the design are transferred; the platform keeps no register of its own.
Implementation and price
This is not an app you switch on. We build the integration for your organisation on our platform, with building blocks we reuse on every project. So it is custom work that does not start from scratch.
A consultant prepares the intake and analyses both systems. We then record the mapping and exceptions field by field, test in the test or acceptance environment and go live at a moment you choose. Costs are a one-off amount for the setup and a monthly amount for platform, monitoring and support.
Frequently asked questions
Must the German payroll tax data be in SuccessFactors?
No. If they are not set up there, the tax adviser completes them in DATEV and the integration does not overwrite them.
Technical details for IT
For those who want to know how it works under the hood: APIs, fields and sources used.
- SuccessFactors is read through the OData API v2 (PerPerson, PerPersonal, EmpEmployment, EmpJob with company, EmpPayCompRecurring, EmpPayCompNonRecurring, EmpEmploymentTermination) with filters on lastModifiedDateTime and fromDate/toDate for future records (asOfDate = today by default). Authentication with OAuth 2.0 SAML bearer assertion; basic authentication is marked deprecated by SAP.
- To DATEV through the Lohnimportdatenservice (master and movement data through the DATEV data centre, activated by the tax adviser, only for selected third-party systems after onboarding on the DATEV Developer Portal) or an ASCII file the tax adviser imports into LODAS. The Lohnaustauschdatenservice (REST, two-way) can follow later as an extension.
Which fields are transferred
The key fields. The full mapping is agreed per customer.
| Field in SAP SuccessFactors | Field in DATEV | Notes |
|---|---|---|
PerPerson.personIdExternal | Personalnummer | Through a fixed mapping if the tax adviser uses their own numbers |
PerPersonal (firstName, lastName) | Vorname, Name | |
EmpEmployment.startDate | Eintrittsdatum | |
EmpJob.standardHours | Wöchentliche Arbeitszeit | |
EmpPayCompRecurring (payComponent, paycompvalue, frequency) | Festbezug of Lohnart | Converted to the monthly amount; lookup to wage types |
EmpPayCompNonRecurring (payComponentCode, value, payDate) | Lohnart (Bewegungsdaten) | In the month of payDate |
EmpEmploymentTermination.endDate | Austrittsdatum |
- SAP Business Accelerator Hub – Employee Central (OData v2)
- SAP Help – Authentication Using OAuth 2.0
- SAP KBA 2756701 – EmpPayCompNonRecurring via OData
- SAP Learning – Analyzing EC OData API performance (effective dating)
- DATEV – Persbericht Lohnaustauschdatenservice (juli 2025)
- DATEV – Lohnimportdatenservice
- SAP – Employee Central Payroll
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