Payroll integration
Workday to DATEV integration: German changes from Workday ready for the tax adviser
With an integration between Workday and DATEV, new German employees, changes, salaries, one-off payments and departures from Workday are ready in the DATEV payroll program, where the tax adviser or your own payroll team takes them over in one action. Nobody retypes Workday changes into LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt, and the tax adviser keeps their own check.
What the integration does
Organisations that manage their German employees in Workday and have payroll run in DATEV, usually by a tax adviser, email a list of changes every month without an integration. The adviser's office retypes it into LODAS or Lohn und Gehalt, and a bonus entered in Workday after the list was sent misses the run.
- HR records the change in Workday for an employee of the German entity.
- KoppelHet fetches the German changes with their effective date and converts them to the master and movement data DATEV expects.
- The delivery goes through the DATEV data centre to the tax adviser's payroll program.
- The tax adviser reviews the delivery and takes it over in one action.
- KoppelHet follows the status of the delivery and reports it if anything is still open before the cut-off.
What to watch for with Workday and DATEV
- DATEV is usually in the hands of the tax adviser. They switch on the import service themselves in DATEV Arbeitsplatz and decide when a delivery is taken over. KoppelHet records that moment in the plan of every German payroll run.
- A delivery from Workday does not enter payroll unseen. The data waits in the DATEV data centre and the user takes it over into the payroll program at the press of a button. Control stays with whoever is responsible for the German payroll calculation.
- DATEV only opens this exchange to selected partner software, after its own review through the DATEV Developer Portal. We include that onboarding in the plan; allow for waiting time on DATEV's side.
- Both the Workday side and the tax adviser receive status information on every delivery. KoppelHet uses it to report which German employees have not been processed yet, instead of waiting until the payslip is wrong.
- In DATEV fixed data and monthly changes are two separate kinds. A bonus from Workday therefore goes as a movement in the month of payment, on the wage type the tax adviser uses for it, not as a change to the fixed salary.
- German tax and social insurance data has to be recorded somewhere. Workday can hold country-specific payroll data with Additional Payroll Data; without that setup the tax adviser completes it in DATEV and the integration does not overwrite it.
- In Workday the German entity has its own pay group, which covers only one country. KoppelHet only reads that pay group, so no data on Dutch or other colleagues reaches the tax adviser.
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
Does this work if our tax adviser runs payroll?
Yes, that is the usual situation. The tax adviser switches on the import service and takes over the deliveries; KoppelHet delivers them on time.
Technical details for IT
For those who want to know how it works under the hood: APIs, fields and sources used.
- Workday is read through a RaaS report on the German pay group and change date (Employee_ID, Legal_Name, Hire_Date, Scheduled_Weekly_Hours, Base_Pay, One_Time_Payment_Plan_Reference, Termination_Date), with an Integration System User with read access only.
- To DATEV through the Lohnimportdatenservice. Master and movement data go as an ASCII import through the DATEV data centre to the DATEV payroll programs and are taken over there; source and user receive status. Activation in DATEV Arbeitsplatz (DATEV Hilfe-Center, Doc. No. 1002326). Access for partner software through onboarding on the DATEV Developer Portal.
- The newer Lohnaustauschdatenservice works in both directions, checks data for plausibility straight away and sends master data back to the HR system. Data back to Workday can follow later as an extension.
Which fields are transferred
The key fields. The full mapping is agreed per customer.
| Field in Workday | Field in DATEV | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Employee_ID | Personalnummer | Through a fixed mapping if the tax adviser uses their own numbers |
Legal_Name | Name, Vorname | |
Hire_Date | Eintrittsdatum | |
Scheduled_Weekly_Hours | Wöchentliche Arbeitszeit | |
Base_Pay | Festbezug (Gehalt) | Converted to the monthly amount in euro |
One_Time_Payment_Plan_Reference | Lohnart (Bewegungsdaten) | Through a lookup to the tax adviser's wage types |
Termination_Date | Austrittsdatum |
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