DATEV Export for WooCommerce — a Buchungsstapel from orders and refunds for your tax adviser

DATEV Export for WooCommerce exports your shop’s orders and refunds in the DATEV format — an EXTF Buchungsstapel file (format version 13) that tax advisers in Germany import into their software. Instead of copying totals by hand or exporting to Excel, you download one CSV file a month: the postings are already split by VAT rate, with revenue accounts, debtor, document number and text.

Honestly about testing. The format follows the description on developer.datev.de, and every generated file — free and Pro, UTF-8, a fiscal year starting in July, 1,000 orders, the e-mail attachment — passed the official DATEV-Format-Prüfprogramm 2.2.3.0 without a single message. We have not done a real import into DATEV Rechnungswesen / Unternehmen online yet: before regular use, ask your adviser to import one test file. Accounts and BU keys are settings agreed with your adviser; the module is a tool for handing over postings, not tax advice. DATEV is a trademark of DATEV eG; the module is not made or endorsed by DATEV.

What the shop and the adviser get

• One file per period: EXTF_Buchungsstapel_<from>_<to>.csv in Windows-1252 (the DATEV standard) or UTF-8 with BOM.
• One posting per VAT rate: products, shipping and fees after discounts, and the document’s postings add up to the order total to the cent. A rounding gap of up to 5 cents is closed on the largest group; a bigger one shows as a warning.
• Refunds as separate credit postings on the refund date by the order’s rates; an amount-only refund is split proportionally, with a warning.
• Document number — the invoice number from your invoicing plugin (for example E-Invoice EN 16931) or the order number; Buchungstext from a template.

What the admin gets

• A preview before download: errors per order (no account for a rate — the file will not download), warnings (another currency — skipped), totals per account and the first postings.
• Header: Beraternummer, Mandantennummer, fiscal year start, account length 4–8, SKR03 / SKR04, Diktatkürzel, Festschreibung.
• Account mapping: VAT rate → revenue account and BU key, an account for lines without VAT, a collective debtor; the SKR03 / SKR04 suggestions button fills only empty fields.
• “Already exported” markers: the next file does not repeat orders, and the log shows who exported which period and when.
• Statuses and date: which statuses go into the file and which date becomes the document date — created, paid or completed.

Pro: payments, debtors, EU and the e-mail to your adviser

• Payment postings: for payment methods you give a clearing account (for example PayPal or Stripe) — the payment on its date and refund payouts. If your adviser already imports the bank statements of those methods, leave this off to avoid double booking.
• A debtor per customer: a registered customer gets their own debtor number from a start number; guests go to the collective debtor with a warning.
• EU and export: sales to consumers in other EU countries (OSS) go to the OSS account with a BU key and the country and rate fields; supplies to companies with a VAT ID go to the intra-Community account with the buyer’s number; sales outside the EU go to the export account.
• A monthly e-mail to your tax adviser with the file attached on the chosen day; if the month has errors, the e-mail goes to the admin instead.

Works together with our other modules for Germany and the EU

• E-Invoice EN 16931 for WooCommerce — ZUGFeRD / XRechnung invoices; DATEV Export puts the RE-… invoice number into the posting’s document field.
• EU VAT Check for WooCommerce — VIES validation of VAT IDs and reverse charge; the DATEV Export Pro rules use the verified number for EU supplies.
• Unit Price Grundpreis for WooCommerce — the price per 1 kg / 1 l in the shop under PAngV.

All four have been tested together in one test shop: orders from both checkouts, invoices, reverse charge and a DATEV file with no Prüfprogramm messages.

How it works — step by step

1. Ask your adviser for the Beraternummer, Mandantennummer, chart of accounts (SKR03 or SKR04) and the accounts for your rates.
2. WooCommerce → DATEV Export → Settings: header, “Fill in the SKR suggestions”, check accounts and BU keys.
3. Export: pick a month and click Preview — the plugin shows errors and totals per account.
4. Fix the errors (usually an account for another country’s rate), download the file and pass it to your adviser.
5. Next month — the same; orders already exported are skipped. With Pro the file reaches your adviser by e-mail on its own.

Under the hood

• Format: a 31-field header, the 125 Buchungsstapel columns per Format_Buchungsstapel.xml version 13, doubled quotes, decimal comma, CR/LF.
• Verification: every file from the run went through DATEV-Format-Prüfprogramm 2.2.3.0 (0 messages) and our own strict validator; on a deliberately broken line the program does catch the errors.
• Shop time zone: an order on 31.08 at 23:30 does not land in September, one on 01.09 at 00:30 does.
• Speed: 1,000 orders (3,002 postings) — under a second in our test, with flat memory thanks to per-page cache resets; the file is built in one request, months with 10,000+ orders were not measured.
• Deleting the plugin removes the settings, the cron job and the “exported” markers.

Installation

1. Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin: choose catcode-datev-export-for-woocommerce-1.0.0.zip and activate.
2. WooCommerce → DATEV Export → Settings: adviser details, chart of accounts, account mapping.
3. Export → Preview → Download the DATEV file.
4. For Pro: paste the licence key from the e-mail after payment or start the 7-day trial, then set up payment accounts, debtors, EU rules and the adviser e-mail.