What KassenSichV and § 146a AO require
The German Fiscal Code (Abgabenordnung, AO) requires you to record every business transaction individually, completely, correctly, in good time and in order. For electronic tills, § 146a AO adds that they must be protected by a certified technical security system, TSE for short. The KassenSichV regulates the details, such as what must appear on the receipt.
In everyday use that means: the TSE signs every transaction, the guest gets a receipt, a TSE outage is documented, and every till is reported to the tax office. This page describes how VidiPOS does that. It is no substitute for tax advice.
Cloud TSE fiskaly SIGN DE
VidiPOS signs with the cloud TSE fiskaly SIGN DE, which is certified by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). You need no USB stick and no hardware TSE. Your business gets its own security module, and each till is registered there with its serial number. You start the setup in the back office.
It is not just the finished receipt that gets signed: the TSE learns when a transaction starts at the till and when it ends. This applies to every type of transaction:
- Receipts and reversals – a reversal is a separate receipt with negative amounts
- Orders to kitchen and bar as separate transactions
- Training bookings as their own transaction type, marked as a training receipt
- Cash movements such as opening balance, deposit, withdrawal or cash in transit
- Aborted transactions as a receipt cancellation
One till, several devices
In VidiPOS, a till is a recording system with its own TSE: it has a fixed serial number, a gaplessly numbered journal and its own daily closing. The tablets and phones you pair with this till are its input devices. They get no TSE of their own and no till registration of their own.
One till is therefore usually enough for one location. A second one makes sense if an area settles up separately, for example a bar with its own accounts. It is only registered with the TSE once you confirm that in the back office.
Receipt with mandatory details and verification QR
For every completed transaction, VidiPOS creates a receipt with the details required by § 6 KassenSichV: business name and address with tax number, till with serial number, receipt number, start and end of the transaction, items with quantity, price and tax rate, tax per rate, total and payment methods. It also carries the TSE data and the verification QR code under DSFinV-K (the standard data format for till data), with which the tax office can check the receipt.
For the obligation to issue a receipt you have two ways: paper or digital. If a receipt printer is connected to the till, the app prints the receipt by itself after payment. For the digital receipt, the till shows a QR code; the guest opens their receipt on their phone with it, prints it or downloads it as a PDF. On request it can also be sent by email.
Outage of TSE or internet
If the TSE doesn’t respond within three seconds, the till doesn’t wait: the transaction is booked, and instead of the TSE data the receipt carries the note “TSE not available” with the cause and start of the outage. If the internet goes down, you keep working in offline mode and take cash payments on the main device of the till. These receipts also carry the outage note.
Transactions are never signed retroactively – the KassenSichV doesn’t provide for it, and fiskaly doesn’t allow it. Instead, VidiPOS keeps an outage log for each till with start, end, cause (TSE or internet), the last successful signature and the number of transactions affected. That documents the outage as the application decree on § 146a AO requires. If it lasts longer, you check the connection and TSE status in the back office.
Kassenmeldung under § 146a para. 4 AO
Anyone who acquires or decommissions an electronic till must notify the tax office within one month. VidiPOS compiles the details from your master data and tills and shows you in the back office the report status of each till and the current deadlines. What is checked is the form of your details, not their tax correctness.
Registering, changing and deregistering a till are each a separate report. You have two ways to do it:
- Report yourself: you download the report data sheet as a PDF free of charge, with all details in the order of the form in Mein ELSTER (the tax office’s online portal)
- Have it reported: submission by VidiPOS via the ELSTER interface is available on request
- Nothing is submitted until you have opened the PDF preview and given your explicit consent in the back office