Why Shopify has no DATEV export
Shopify is an international sales platform. DATEV is a German cooperative product for tax advisers and bookkeeping, with its own charts of accounts and its own data format.
Shopify does not cover the German market's requirements: no chart of accounts, no journal entries, no sequential invoice numbers in the tax sense. A direct interface would be a single-market detour for Shopify.
That is not negligence but a product decision — and the reason this intermediate step exists.
The route in two stages
Stage one: Shopify orders have to become documents in accounting software. That can be done by hand, through a CSV import, or through an integration. From roughly twenty orders a day, doing it by hand stops paying.
Stage two: the export to DATEV runs from the accounting software. Both sevdesk and Lexware Office have a built-in interface for it, and both produce the usual formats.
The decisive point: the quality of the DATEV export depends almost entirely on the quality of stage one. What arrives wrong there exports cleanly wrong afterwards.
DATEV Unternehmen Online
Many firms work with DATEV Unternehmen Online — a platform on which client and tax adviser exchange documents and accounting data.
For you that usually means uploading documents or exporting them there from your accounting software, and the firm works on from there. Whether your adviser uses that route or another is worth settling before you choose an export method.
Where it snags in practice
The typical queries from a tax adviser rarely arise at the export itself. They arise before it:
- Payouts booked as revenue. Shopify pays out in batches and deducts fees. The payout amount is not revenue — the gross amount per order belongs in the books, with the fee separately.
- Fees not recorded. Let them disappear inside the payout figure and you lose a business expense and gain a discrepancy nobody can explain.
- Tax cases not separated. Domestic, intra-Community, OSS and non-EU have to remain distinguishable. Land them all on one account and the VAT return becomes manual work.
- No own invoice number. The Shopify order number is not sufficient under tax law. Without an own number range, the trace is missing.
- Refunds not treated as credit notes. A refund is not negative revenue but a document in its own right.
What to settle with your tax adviser first
Talking these points through once at the start saves more time over a financial year than any optimisation of the export.
- Which chart of accounts does the firm use — SKR03 or SKR04?
- Which account do the payment provider fees belong on?
- How should OSS sales be separated?
- How are refunds and chargebacks handled?
- Do you work through DATEV Unternehmen Online or via a file export?
- At what rhythm should the export run — monthly, quarterly?
Where zrapp sits in this chain
zrapp covers stage one: paid Shopify orders become documents in sevdesk or Lexware Office, with the assigned tax case, individual line items, shipping and discounts — and with a reference back to the order.
Stage two is not zrapp's job. The DATEV export then runs from the accounting software itself. That is not a gap but a division of labour: the interface there is maintained, and a second one beside it would be an extra place for things to go wrong.
What zrapp does influence is the quality of what gets exported — tax cases, document references and the separation of invoice amount from payout. Setup is described in connecting Shopify to sevdesk and connecting Shopify to Lexware Office.
