# Pleo DATEV integration

*Pleo → DATEV*

**In short:** A Pleo to DATEV integration turns every settled card expense, receipt, reimbursement, and wallet top-up into bookings your Steuerberater can work with - each expense coded to the right SKR03 or SKR04 account with the correct BU-Schlüssel, tagged with Kostenstelle and Kostenträger, booked against the Pleo wallet as its own Finanzkonto, and the receipt delivered as a Beleg into DATEV Unternehmen online. Done properly it runs daily and idempotently: nothing is booked twice, nothing waits for a month-end export.

## What a Pleo to DATEV integration actually does

Pleo sits at the front of the spend process. An employee taps a card, photographs the receipt, picks a category, maybe adds a team tag, and the transaction is done. Everything after that belongs to a different world: DATEV, and the Kanzlei working inside it, needs the same event as a Buchungssatz with a Sachkonto, a Gegenkonto, a BU-Schlüssel, a Belegfeld, a cost-centre dimension, and the receipt archived so it survives a Betriebsprüfung.

Pleo ships a native DATEV export, and for one German entity on a plain chart of accounts it is often enough. The work begins where that export stops: several entities, mandatory Kostenstelle and Kostenträger on every line, out-of-pocket reimbursements that need personal accounts, foreign suppliers that are reverse-charge rather than 19% input tax, wallet funding that has to reconcile against the bank statement, and receipts that turn up four days after the transaction. A real integration closes that gap continuously instead of once a month.

## What data moves

| Pleo object or event | Becomes in DATEV | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Settled card expense | Expense booking against the Pleo wallet account | Only settled amounts, never the pending authorisation |
| Expense category / account code | Sachkonto in SKR03 or SKR04 | Mapped once with your Kanzlei, including partially deductible accounts |
| Receipt image or PDF | Beleg in DATEV Unternehmen online | Delivered via the DATEV Rechnungsdatenservice, linked to the booking |
| Tags (team, project, entity) | KOST1 / KOST2 | Cost centre and cost object per line, not per batch |
| Extracted VAT amount and rate | BU-Schlüssel | Reviewed against supplier country and service type, not taken on trust |
| Out-of-pocket reimbursement / mileage | Booking against the employee's Kreditor account | Or handed to payroll where reimbursement runs through Lohn |
| Wallet top-up from the house bank | Geldtransit posting | Lets wallet and bank account reconcile independently |
| FX markup and card fees | Nebenkosten des Geldverkehrs | Booked separately from the expense they arose on |
| Pleo Invoices vendor bill | Kreditor invoice with open-item reference | Belegfeld 1 carries the invoice number for OPOS matching |

The exact accounts, tax keys, clarification account, and cost-centre scheme are agreed once with your tax advisor and encoded in the pipeline. Nobody maps them again by hand.

## The details that break naive exports

- **Authorisation is not settlement.** A card transaction first appears with an authorised amount. Hotel holds, tips, and foreign-currency purchases settle at a different figure days later. Booking the first number and never revisiting it leaves a wallet account that drifts by a few euros a week and nobody can explain by year end.
- **Expenses keep changing.** A receipt is uploaded on Thursday, the bookkeeper recategorises on Friday, an admin adds a project tag the week after. A delta sync keyed on creation date misses all of it. The pipeline has to track the last modification and re-emit a correction, and it has to know which accounting period is still open before it does.
- **Receipt files are the slow part.** Expense records are cheap to read; the attached documents are individual downloads, and a month-end backfill of several thousand has to be paced against Pleo's rate limits rather than fired off in parallel.
- **German deductibility rules do not live in Pleo.** Bewirtungskosten split 70 / 30 between deductible and non-deductible, gifts above the statutory threshold move to a non-deductible account, and Kleinbetragsrechnungen up to 250 euro carry less mandatory data than a full invoice. These are DATEV-side account decisions that a generic category mapping cannot express.
- **VAT on foreign receipts.** A SaaS invoice from Ireland is reverse charge under section 13b UStG, an Italian restaurant receipt carries VAT you cannot reclaim in Germany, and an intra-community goods purchase needs its own key. Optical extraction from the receipt gets the number right and the treatment wrong.
- **Idempotency and period locks.** Re-running an export double-books the month. Every Pleo expense carries a stable identifier that the pipeline records, so a retry, a partial failure, or a re-run never produces a second booking, and corrections to a closed period are routed to the open one instead.
- **Partial failures must not ship silently.** If eleven expenses in a batch of four hundred hit an unmapped category, we do not deliver a quietly incomplete batch. Those lines are quarantined and flagged while the rest posts on time.

## How we build and run it

We treat this as a pipeline, not a monthly chore. Expenses, receipts, reimbursements, and wallet movements are read from Pleo on a schedule, validated, enriched with your agreed coding, and delivered into DATEV as a booking batch and as documents in DATEV Unternehmen online, matching whichever route your Kanzlei actually works with.

The pipeline is idempotent by construction: each Pleo expense has a stable identifier and a version, so nothing is booked twice and later changes arrive as explicit corrections. It runs on cloud-native, fully EU-hosted AWS infrastructure, so receipts and employee data never leave the EU. That keeps the DPA / AVV with your tax advisor and your GDPR position straightforward rather than something you have to argue for.

Then we keep it running. Monitoring, alerting, incident response, and watching for Pleo and DATEV API changes are contractually ours. You get a named owner and an SLA, at a price agreed before the build starts.

## When this integration is worth building

If ten cards produce a hundred domestic expenses a month, all with receipts, all in euro, one entity, one cost centre, then Pleo's own export and a disciplined bookkeeper are the right answer and we will tell you that. The integration earns its place once headcount and card volume grow, once you run more than one entity or need cost-centre reporting that finance actually trusts, once a meaningful share of spend is foreign-currency or reverse-charge, or once your Kanzlei is billing you every month to repair an export that should have arrived correct.

## Frequently asked questions

### Pleo already has a DATEV export. Why would I need an integration?

For a single German entity on a standard chart of accounts with tidy categories, the built-in export often is enough, and we will say so. It gets thin once you run several entities, need Kostenstelle and Kostenträger on every line, reimburse employees through personal accounts, or want receipts and bookings to land in DATEV Unternehmen online without anyone downloading and re-uploading files. A pipeline also handles the awkward part the export ignores: expenses that change after they were first exported.

### How do you treat the Pleo wallet in the chart of accounts?

As its own Finanzkonto, not as an expense pot. Every card expense books against that account, and each top-up from your house bank runs through a Geldtransitkonto so the bank statement and the wallet reconcile independently. The balance in DATEV then matches the balance in Pleo on any given day, which is what makes the account auditable instead of merely plausible.

### What happens to VAT on foreign supplier receipts?

It gets the treatment German VAT law actually requires, not the one the receipt scan suggests. Digital services invoiced from another EU member state are reverse charge under section 13b UStG rather than 19% input tax, intra-community acquisitions of goods get their own key, and foreign hotel or restaurant VAT is not deductible as Vorsteuer in Germany at all. We agree those rules per supplier and per category once, then the pipeline applies them consistently.

### What about expenses with no receipt, or receipts that arrive a week late?

Both are normal in a card programme and both are handled explicitly. Expenses without a Beleg are either held back or booked to an agreed clarification account so the missing document is visible rather than buried, and Pleo's own missing-receipt status drives the reminder loop. When a receipt or a corrected category appears later, the pipeline updates the booking in the open period instead of touching a month your Kanzlei has already closed.

### Who operates it after go-live?

We do. The pipeline runs on cloud-native, fully EU-hosted infrastructure that we monitor, with a named owner, alerting, and an SLA. If Pleo changes its API or DATEV changes an import format, that is our work to do under contract, not something your accounting team discovers on the second working day of the month.

## Related integrations

- [Moss ↔ DATEV](https://seamless.engineering/integrations/moss-datev/): Moss DATEV integration
- [SAP Concur ↔ DATEV](https://seamless.engineering/integrations/sap-concur-datev/): SAP Concur DATEV integration
- [Spendesk ↔ DATEV](https://seamless.engineering/integrations/spendesk-datev/): Spendesk DATEV integration
- [Amazon ↔ DATEV](https://seamless.engineering/integrations/amazon-datev/): Amazon DATEV integration
- [Billbee ↔ DATEV](https://seamless.engineering/integrations/billbee-datev/): Billbee DATEV integration
- [eBay ↔ DATEV](https://seamless.engineering/integrations/ebay-datev/): eBay DATEV integration

## Browse by system

- [All DATEV integrations](https://seamless.engineering/integrations/datev/)
- [DATEV API changelog](https://seamless.engineering/api-changelog/datev/): No breaking changes or deprecations in the last 90 days

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