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🇩🇪 What you need to know about managing the new mandatory German eAU system in Personio from 2023

Related products: Absences

Dear Community,

If you are working in a German-based company, starting from next year, your employees will no longer be required to submit sickness certificates themselves. Instead, employers will be responsible for requesting them from the insurer, either through their payroll tool or through the ITSG sv.net website.

In this update, we will give you some initial information on the electronic certificate of incapacity (eAU) in the context of Personio. More & detailed instructions will be shared in the Help Center in the future, as soon as the new feature is released.
 

What is eAU and why does it matter?


eAU stands for electronic certificate of incapacity for work (Elektronische Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung). Until this point, Doctors have been giving sick employees some paper confirmations (Gelber Schein / Yellow slip), which employees are required to send to their employers.

From Jan 1, 2023, for publicly insured employees, Doctors will be obliged to transmit sickness notifications digitally to the health insurances, and employers or their tax advisors will have to retrieve the eAUs directly from the health insurers. Employees will no longer be obliged to provide a yellow slip to their employer.

 

How to talk to your employees about eAU

It’s important that your employees understand what to expect on January 1st regarding their sick certificates. Here are the key points they should understand:

  • If they have public insurance, when they track a sick period in Personio, they no longer need to upload a certificate. Their doctor will have sent an electronic sick certificate to their insurer. However, for the first 3 months, we recommend that you tell your employees to still upload a physical certificate if they get one. The transition to eAU will likely not be completely smooth, and it is safer to have employees still upload physical certificates as a backup.

  • If they have private insurance, nothing about the process will change for them. They will still get a physical note from their Doctor and should upload it to Personio.

  • Child sick notes will still be done the same way, and they should not expect eAUs for those.​​​​​​

Many employee contracts include the obligation of employees to submit proof for their sickness. If you plan on changing this contract, do let employees know.

For “mini-jobbers”: Ensure that any secondary insurer for your mini-jobbers is noted in any external payroll tool. Read more about managing eAUs and minijobbers here.

 

How to access your employee’s eAUs

 

Depending on which accounting system you use and whether you use the DATEV integration, for example, there will be different ways to access the sickness notifications in the future.

Click on “Show Content” to read the step-by-step guide.

1. Accessing eAUs yourself through sv.net or external payroll tool.

  1. An employee creates a request for a sick leave. If the employee is located in Germany and has public insurance, their Doctor has issued them an eAU that you need to retrieve.
     

  2. Log in to sv.net or your payroll tool (DATEV, Sage, etc.) and create a request for an eAU for this employee.

    • If your payroll tool is not able to request eAUs, you must use sv.net.

    • Here is the tutorial for requesting eAUs in DATEV.
       

  3. Alternatively, you can retrieve eAUs on a weekly or monthly basis, instead of adhoc:

    1. Create a custom report in Personio with

      • sick periods

      • days with certificate

      • insurance type, and

      • office.

    2. Export the custom report, and filter just for employees that have public insurance and are located in German offices. These are the ones for which you must request an eAU.

    3. Log in to sv.net or your payroll tool and create a request for the eAU for these employees.
       

  4. After some time (anywhere between a few minutes and 2 weeks), you will receive an email from sv.net or your payroll tool once the eAU has been returned. If the eAU does not cover all the dates of the employee’s absence, you can request an additional eAU.
     

  5. Download the eAU, upload it to the relevant absence period in Personio, and mark the document status as approved.
     

  6. In order to check which periods are still missing an eAU, you can always create a custom report with 1) sick periods 2) days with certificate 3) insurance type and 4) office, to see which employees are eAU-qualified but don’t yet have a certificate.

 

2. Enabling your tax advisor to access eAUs

This applies to you if your tax advisor will be retrieving eAUs on your behalf.

  1. On a weekly or monthly basis, send your tax advisor a custom report with the following fields: 

     
    • sick periods
    • days with certificate

    • insurance type, and

    • office.
       

  2. The tax advisor will request eAUs for the employees that have sick periods in that timeframe, and have public insurance and are based in Germany. They can do this either through the payroll tool or sv.net.
     

  3. The eAUs will be returned in the payroll tool. Your tax advisor can then forward you the eAU to upload it to Personio, or directly upload it to the absence period if they have access to Personio.
     

  4. In order to check to see for which periods you are still missing an eAU, you can always create a custom report with 1) sick periods 2) days with certificate 3) insurance type and 4) office, to see which employees are eAU-qualified but don’t yet have a certificate.

 

 

Coming soon: Automated eAU retrieval with the DATEV Integration


Our Product Team is building a new feature that will automatically retrieve and store eAUs for you, with no manual work required. As of now this will not be ready on January 1st, but at some point in Q1 2023.

The Automated eAU retrieval feature will be available for customers with DATEV Integration add-on. Check if you have this in your Salary & Payroll settings. If you have a tab for DATEV, you have the Integration. If you would like to purchase the DATEV Integration add-on to access this feature, talk to your Growth Manager.

Click on “Show Content” to read the step-by-step guide.

If your company has the DATEV Integration add-on, managing eAUs will be automated and seamless.

  1. When an employee tracks a sick period, Personio will automatically determine if they are eau-eligible, and if so, request an eAU from the insurance companies.
     

  2. When an eAU comes back from the insurer, Personio will add it to the relevant absence period, and notify both the employee and the approver.
     

  3. If there is no eAU, Personio will notify the employee and approver. At any point you can check on an absence period to see the status of the eAU.
     

  4. Your tax advisor will also be able to directly view eAUs in the DATEV Interface, without having to make any requests.
     

  5. If they are not eAU-eligible (they have private insurance, or are located outside of Germany), they will be asked to upload a physical certificate as normal.


FYI: What you can see is a Prototype. The final design is subject to change.

 


The absence settings of "Sickness" usually do not have to be adjusted in Personio due to this change.
Here, everything remains the same. :) 

 

We hope this information is of help. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments! :)

Best Regards, 
Daniele

More & detailed instructions will be shared in the Help Center in the future, as soon as the new feature is released.

Hi there,

Is there any update on this? We are seeing a certificate cancellation requirement option for line managers now and I can’t seem to find the setting that controls that in Personio. Is it an automatic thing or something that we can toggle on and off, or we can give to the HR manager rather than the line manager to decide on? 

Cheers, 

Sebastien 

 


Hi @Sebastien,

There is no update yet regarding this topic. I am happy to support you in the question you shared, though 😊.

If I understand correctly, line managers are receiving an approval request for absence certificates, and they can decide within the approval if they can cancel the certificate requirement. Is this correct?

Thank you for the clarification.

Best,

Andrea


Hi Andrea, 


Thanks for the response and offer of support. Probably the easiest way is to show you: 

This is a screen grab from the screen of the TL of this person. Neither the person who requested the sick days or the TL are in P&C. I’d like to know if I can make it so that the TL is the one that approves the sick days (we have it set so that the approval then comes to P&C anyway so that we are also aware when someone is off sick), but that P&C are the ones that receive this second task and are the only ones allowed to remove the requirement for a sick note, since we are the ones that will be accessing the sick notes digitally in the future (not the TL). 

 

Hope this makes sense. 


Cheers,

 

Sebastien


Hi @Sebastien,

Thank you for the clarification, I understand now. In this case, P&C needs to be the first approver within the Approval workflow for this Absence type. The first approver is the only one that can cancel the certificate requirement of an absence period. 

Let me know if I should clarify anything else 🙂.

Best,

Andrea


Hi @Andrea ,

do you please happen to have any updates here, as Q1 has just ended? We have been battling with the digital sick notes for quite a while now, hoping to have the system support in place soon. It would be great to have an estimation on when will this system support come. Many thanks in advance for any update.

Best regards,

Veronika


Dear @vstranska,

The beta test for the digital eAU has been running since March. The product manager developing this functionality and their team are still discussing for this first test phase.

After the team gathers initial results from the beta test, we'll be able to say more. You can read the most recent information in the following help center article (in German):

Update, 03.04. Beta-Test | Elektronische Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung (eAU) über die DATEV Integration | März 2023

I am aware that you are hoping for something different here, but I do not want to give false hope. Therefore, our product team will not share details until they are certain of the release date and there are no more major changes.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!

Kind regards
Andrea