SEPA Direct Debit & DATEV Export EXTF Format & SKR Charts — Knowledge Module

DATEV Export — EXTF Format & SKR Charts

Overview

The accounting-export half of German billing QA: the EXTF/Buchungsstapel CSV that third-party systems hand to a tax adviser's DATEV, its header and record format, the traps that import cleanly and book wrongly, and the SKR chart-of-accounts landscape — including the non-profit tax spheres whose loss is this module's highest-value test.

The payment-rails half is sepa-direct-debit; the shared failure taxonomy, fixture matrix and validation heuristics live in this pack's root.

The EXTF/Buchungsstapel Format

Verified against the official DATEV sample file EXTF_Buchungsstapel.csv from DATEV's public Muster bundle (file dated 2025-06-18). Structure:

• Line 1 — the header, 31 fields
• Line 2 — column names, 125 columns
• Line 3 onward — booking records

Header fields, by position (values shown are the sample's):

#	Field	Sample	Meaning
1	Kennzeichen	"EXTF"	EXTF = written by a third-party program. DTVF is reserved for DATEV's own tools — a club system must emit EXTF
2	Versionsnummer	700	Header version. 700 is the only current value; 300/510 are legacy (DATEV Rechnungswesen V3.0 / V5.1)
3	Datenkategorie	21	21 = Buchungsstapel. 16 = Debitoren/Kreditoren, 20 = Sachkontenbeschriftungen, 65 = wiederkehrende Buchungen
4	Formatname	"Buchungsstapel"	Must agree with field 3
5	Formatversion	13	Current. v13 has 125 record fields, v12 had 124. Earlier versions are shorter — DATEV's 2020 field description (Dok. 1003221) enumerates only 120 — so do not assume a fixed count below v12
6	erzeugt am	20240130140440439	17 digits — YYYYMMDDHHMMSSFFF
11	Berater	29098	Tax adviser number, 4–7 digits
12	Mandant	55003	Client number, 1–5 digits
13	WJ-Beginn	20240101	Fiscal-year start, YYYYMMDD. Supplies the year for Belegdatum
14	Sachkontenlänge	4	Single digit 4–8. Must match the target client's DATEV configuration
15/16	Datum von / bis	20240101 / 20240831	Period covered
19	Buchungstyp	1	1 = Finanzbuchführung, 2 = Jahresabschluss
21	Festschreibung	0	0 = not locked, 1 = locked. The official sample emits 0. The provable auto-lock default lives on record field 114, not here — see the traps table
22	WKZ	"EUR"	Currency
27	Sachkontenrahmen	"03"	Which SKR the batch is booked against — see below

File-level rules that cause silent non-import (DATEV help document 1044208): the filename must begin EXTF_ and end .csv; a Buchungsstapel holds at most 99,999 rows (a 5-digit record counter) — once Saldo- and Gruppensummenzeilen are counted the usable posting count is 99,997, so the boundary trips before 100,000; the client's Berater/Mandant/fiscal-year must match the target ledger; and if line 1 is missing, DATEV simply does not offer the file for import. DATEV's own diagnostic is to open the file and check that cell A1 reads EXTF — if it reads Umsatz (ohne Soll/Haben-Kz), the header line was dropped.

Record field order — the first 14 columns, which carry the booking:

1 Umsatz (ohne Soll/Haben-Kz) │ 2 Soll/Haben-Kennzeichen │ 3 WKZ Umsatz │ 4 Kurs
5 Basis-Umsatz │ 6 WKZ Basis-Umsatz │ 7 Konto │ 8 Gegenkonto (ohne BU-Schlüssel)
9 BU-Schlüssel │ 10 Belegdatum │ 11 Belegfeld 1 │ 12 Belegfeld 2 │ 13 Skonto │ 14 Buchungstext

A third-party export that names columns like Umsatz, S/H, BU, Gegenkonto, Belegfeld, Konto, KOST1, Buchungstext is a Buchungsstapel-shaped file even when the vendor never uses the word — hold it to this format.

Formats and traps, all confirmed in the sample:

Thing	Value	Trap
Field separator	;
Text delimiter	"	Text fields quoted, numerics bare
Decimal separator	comma — 100,18	A period silently changes the amount or voids the row
Line endings	CRLF
Belegdatum	3101 = DDMM only	The year is not in the field. It comes from the header's fiscal year and date range. A booking outside Datum von–Datum bis lands in the wrong year — a silent, expensive class-3 failure
Encoding	DATEV's contract: ISO-8859-1 / CP1252 by default. UTF-8 is accepted only with a BOM	Emit CP1252. BOM-less UTF-8 is unambiguously wrong — DATEV reads it as CP1252 and mojibakes every umlaut. The "UTF-8 with a BOM is accepted" carve-out is widely repeated but is not stated in DATEV's own field description (Dok. 1003221 says ANSI), so do not treat it as a pass condition. DATEV's own 2025 sample is BOM-less UTF-8 and is therefore not a safe encoding template
Soll/Haben-Kennzeichen	"S" / "H"	Refers to field 7 Konto, not the Gegenkonto: S = Soll (Belastung), H = Haben (Gutschrift)
Umsatz (field 1)	100,18	Must be positive with exactly 2 decimals, and 0,00 is invalid. A zero-amount line is a rejected row, not a no-op
Belegfeld 1 (field 11)	invoice number, ≤ 36 chars	Restricted charset: word characters plus $ & % * + - /. Spaces, umlauts, ., ,, ;, : are invalid. Products that match payments on an invoice number write it here — if that number ever contains a space or a dot, this field is where it breaks
Account lengths	Sample: Konto 48400 (5 digits), Gegenkonto 8401 (4), Sachkontenlänge 4	Personal accounts (Debitor/Kreditor) may be exactly one digit longer than Sachkonten. DATEV's only hard prohibition is an all-zero account number; short accounts need not be zero-padded. The real hazard is Excel silently stripping leading zeros on a round trip
Festschreibung	header field 21 and record field 114	Two independent switches. An empty record field 114 means undefined → auto-locked. If any single row carries 1, the whole batch locks on import — after which corrections are only possible as Generalumkehr/Storno

Chart of accounts — and a live finding

SKR03 (ordered by business process) and SKR04 (ordered by the statutory balance-sheet structure) are the two general German frameworks. They collide on the same numbers with opposite meanings:

Number	In SKR03	In SKR04
1200	Bank	Forderungen aus L+L
1600	Verbindlichkeiten aus L+L	Kasse

Revenue is the mirror image — not a number collision but a renumbering, which is just as easy to get wrong in the other direction:

Concept	SKR03	SKR04
Erlöse 19 % USt	8400	4400

Note that 4400 is not a revenue account in SKR03 — class 4 there is Betriebliche Aufwendungen. So a file that books revenue to 4400 while header field 27 declares SKR03 is booking revenue into an expense account.

An export booked against the wrong SKR imports cleanly and books everything wrong — the purest class-3 failure in this module. Header field 27 declares which chart is intended.

The Verein-specific chart, and a question worth asking: vendor copy in the German club-software space still advertises Standardkontenrahmen SKR 49. SKR49 is discontinued. DATEV's succession is documented: SKR42 has been available since fiscal year 2022 and replaces it; SKR49 was retired at the 2024/2025 year change (last new setup FY2023, last carry-forward FY2024), and from 2025 only SKR42 can be booked.

A marketing page is not evidence of current product behaviour: field 27 is a per-client configuration, and "the copy advertises a retired chart" is a different finding from "the export is broken". Establish what field 27 actually carries before filing anything.

This matters beyond the label, because the two charts separate tax spheres by completely different mechanisms:

• SKR49 encoded the sphere in the account number — the leading digit was the Tätigkeitsbereich (2 = ideeller Bereich, 3 = ergebnisneutrale Posten incl. erhaltene Spenden, 4 = Vermögensverwaltung, 5 = Zweckbetrieb Sport, 6 = übrige Zweckbetriebe incl. Kultur, 7/8 = steuerpflichtige Geschäftsbetriebe). Classes 3 and 6 are easy to forget and will mis-bucket donations and non-sport Zweckbetriebe on a legacy export.
• SKR42 does not. The sphere moves into KOST1 — record field 37: 1 ideeller Bereich, 2 Vermögensverwaltung, 3 Zweckbetrieb, 4 wirtschaftlicher Geschäftsbetrieb, 9 Sammelposten.

Consequence, and the highest-value DATEV test in this module: for an SKR42 club, an income or expense booking that leaves field 37 empty silently loses its sphere assignment — the entire purpose of the chart — and the export still validates. A product whose export carries a KOST1 column and whose billing UI has cost centres plausibly has the wiring; whether it is populated per sphere is a per-product fact — establish it before filing.

Two scoping caveats that must travel with this test, or it produces false positives: (a) it applies to SKR42 clients only — on SKR03/SKR04 KOST1 is legitimately optional, so establish header field 27 before asserting anything; (b) sphere cost centres attach to income and expense postings, not unconditionally to every line in the file.

(Beware: third-party articles that describe SKR42 sphere assignment as account-number ranges are wrong — that was SKR49's mechanism. The two are widely conflated in both directions.)

Why spheres exist at all. German non-profit tax law splits a club's activity into four spheres because only the last is fully taxable:

Sphere	Typical club income	Taxed?
Ideeller Bereich	Membership fees, joining fees, donations, grants	Exempt; no input-VAT deduction
Vermögensverwaltung	Interest, long-term letting, leased advertising rights	Exempt
Zweckbetrieb	Entry and start fees for sporting events, courses	Exempt
Wirtschaftlicher Geschäftsbetrieb	Club bar run in-house, food and drink, advertising and sponsoring	Taxable

The threshold is a Freigrenze, not an allowance: exceed it by one euro and the whole profit becomes taxable. It was raised to 50,000 € (gross receipts, including VAT) effective 1 January 2026 — as were the coach allowance (Übungsleiterpauschale) to 3,300 € and the volunteer allowance (Ehrenamtspauschale) to 960 €. Sources still quoting 45,000 € / 3,000 € / 840 € are pre-2026.

Two rules that catch club software out: food-and-drink sales and advertising are forced out of the sports-event bucket regardless of amount, and covering a commercial loss out of ideelle funds endangers the club's charitable status outright. Mis-assigning a Kostenstelle is therefore not a cosmetic defect.

Gotchas

1. Belegdatum has no year. DATEV's DDMM plus a header period is a silent year-boundary trap. How DATEV disambiguates a month earlier than the fiscal-year start is not documented — do not guess; test it.
2. Emit CP1252. BOM-less UTF-8 mojibakes every umlaut; the "UTF-8 with a BOM" carve-out is not in DATEV's own field description, so do not rely on it. DATEV's own sample file is BOM-less UTF-8, so the sample is not a safe template for encoding.
3. EXTF vs DTVF. A third-party system must write EXTF, and the filename must match.
4. Festschreibung is two fields, and one bad row locks the batch. Record field 114 left empty means auto-lock, not no lock.
5. SKR49 is discontinued; SKR42 puts the tax sphere in KOST1. An SKR42 export whose income and expense rows omit KOST1 loses the sphere split silently. Check header field 27 first — on SKR03/SKR04 KOST1 is optional and asserting it produces false positives.
6. DATEV's published field regexes do not match DATEV's own sample files in at least six places (Datenkategorie, Formatname, Formatversion, BU-Schlüssel, Sachkontenrahmen, Generalumkehr). Do not implement the regexes as literal validators — use the Prüfprogramm.
7. The 2026 statutory figures changed. 50,000 € Freigrenze, 3,300 € coach allowance, 960 € volunteer allowance. Anything quoting 45,000 / 3,000 / 840 is stale.

References

Retrieved 2026-08-08. DATEV documents are copyrighted — this module describes and cites them; it reproduces no specification text.

Source	Reference
DATEV format documentation, Musterdaten bundle, and the free Prüfprogramm DATEV-Format v2.2.3.0	https://developer.datev.de — sample EXTF_Buchungsstapel.csv dated 2025-06-18
DATEV help documents	1044208 (why a file is not offered for import), 1080697 (Festschreibung), 1031527 (SKR49 → SKR42 succession), 1022996 (SKR42 sphere cost centres)
SKR42 / SKR49 chart definitions	DATEV Art.-Nr. 12901/12902 (SKR42), 11180 (SKR49, discontinued)
2026 statutory figures	Steueränderungsgesetz 2025 — §§ 64, 67a AO (50,000 €), § 3 Nr. 26 / 26a EStG (3,300 € / 960 €)