SAP Concur DATEV integration

What a SAP Concur to DATEV integration actually does

Concur is where spend is captured and approved. It knows the traveller, the expense type, the itemised hotel folio, the corporate card feed, the receipt image, the cost centre the manager picked, and the day the report was approved. DATEV is where that spend has to become accounting: an expense account, a tax key, a document reference, a cost centre, and a liability against the employee that a bank booking later clears.

Nothing in Concur is expressed in those terms. An expense type is a business category, not an account number. Concur’s tax fields describe what was charged, not what is deductible in a German advance VAT return. An allocation is a percentage, not a KOST1 value. A SAP Concur to DATEV integration performs that translation the same way every time, so the close stops being a re-keying exercise.

What data moves

SAP Concur object or event	Becomes in DATEV	Notes
Approved expense report (header)	One document with the employee’s personal creditor account on the credit side	Report ID mapped to a short stable document reference; Belegfeld1 is length-limited
Expense entry, by expense type	Expense booking on the mapped SKR03 / SKR04 account	Expense type to account mapping agreed once, then applied automatically
Itemisation (hotel folio, for example)	Separate lines for accommodation, breakfast, parking	Different accounts, tax treatment, and deductibility per component
Allocation	KOST1 / KOST2 on each line	Percentage splits must resolve to the cent
Entertainment expense	Split into deductible and non-deductible portions	German rules treat 70% as deductible while input VAT stays fully recoverable
Per diem and mileage	Tax-free reimbursement plus any taxable excess	Meal reductions and the taxable remainder need a defined destination
VAT amount per entry	Input VAT via the correct tax key, or expense	Domestic VAT is deductible; foreign VAT is not, and is coded separately
Corporate card transaction	Settlement against the card clearing account	Company-paid and employee-paid transactions post differently
Cash advance	Advance account, cleared by the report	Prevents double reimbursement
Concur Invoice payment request	Creditor booking on the supplier account	Requires supplier numbers that match your DATEV creditor master data
Payment confirmation	Clearing of the personal or creditor account	Closes the loop between approval and money leaving the bank
Receipt image	Document in DATEV Unternehmen online	Keeps the booking auditable under GoBD

Accounts, tax keys, cost-centre logic, and the employee-to-account mapping are agreed once with your accounting and your tax advisor and then encoded in the pipeline.

The details that break naive extracts

A hand-built export from Concur gets the totals roughly right and leaves the expensive parts unsolved:

• Reports do not stay still. A report can be sent back, corrected, and re-approved after it appeared in an earlier extract. Keying only on the report identifier means the correction either never arrives or arrives as a duplicate. The pipeline tracks report and entry state, so a change produces a correction rather than a second booking.
• Domestic and foreign VAT are not the same thing. A hotel invoice from Munich yields deductible input VAT. The same stay in Vienna does not, at least not in your German return. Treating both as recoverable inflates the claim, treating both as cost quietly gives money away.
• Allocations round badly. A single entry split 33 / 33 / 34 across three cost centres produces line amounts that must still add up to the entry total. DATEV rejects the batch when they do not, and it rejects the whole batch, not the offending line.
• Entertainment and per diems are tax logic, not categories. The non-deductible share of entertainment, the reduction of per diems when meals were provided, and the taxable portion above the statutory rate all have to land in defined accounts, or payroll and the annual accounts disagree later.
• Card transactions are settled twice if you are careless. A company-paid card transaction is not a reimbursement. It clears against the card clearing account, and only the employee-paid portion creates a liability to the employee.
• API access is not free-form. Concur APIs are paginated, rate-limited, and authenticated with tokens that rotate. A one-off script works until the token refresh fails on a Friday evening and nobody notices until the close.
• Booking batches are all or nothing. A single invalid tax key or an out-of-period posting date fails an entire import. Validation therefore has to happen before the batch is written, not after DATEV rejects it.

How we build and run it

We build this as a pipeline. Approved reports, card transactions, invoice payment requests, and payment confirmations are pulled from Concur on a schedule, validated against a strict schema, transformed into your agreed DATEV coding, and delivered as a DATEV-format booking batch or through the DATEV document and booking-proposal interfaces where that suits your workflow better. Receipt images travel with the booking, so the document reference in DATEV resolves to a real receipt.

Every report and entry carries a stable identifier, and the pipeline records what it has already posted. A retry or a replay after an outage never produces a second booking, and an amended report produces a correcting posting rather than a silent overwrite. It runs on cloud-native, fully EU-hosted infrastructure. Travel data is personal data, so keeping it inside the EU is what keeps the DPA and your GDPR documentation straightforward.

Then we keep it running. Monitoring, alerting, incident response, and watching for changes to the Concur and DATEV interfaces are our contractual responsibility, with a named owner and an SLA, scoped at a fixed price before anything is built.

When this integration is worth building

If a handful of people travel occasionally, all spend is domestic, and one person posts the reports in an afternoon each month, you do not need this and we will say so. It earns its place when report volume makes manual posting a recurring multi-day job, when travel crosses borders and VAT treatment stops being uniform, when cost-centre reporting has to be right rather than approximately right, or when finance spends the first week of every month reconciling what Concur approved against what actually got booked.