A Japanese-owned SME in Germany tried implementing Personio — Part 1: Background of the implementation and DATEV payroll integration
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This is Ito from Berlin.
Classmethod Europe is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year! 🎉
In this milestone year, we bid farewell to Timetac, the attendance management system we had been using since we had only 6 employees, and switched to Personio, which comprehensively handles attendance and HR for our current 16 employees.
Our European base needs an attendance management system that can comply with local labor laws and payroll calculation rules.
In this series, we share the HR and labor management challenges that a small Japanese company in Europe (German corporation) actually encountered, and how we solved them with specific tools and settings, presented as a hands-on guide with screenshots.
We hope this will be useful for other small and medium-sized businesses operating in Europe.
Background Leading Up to Personio Implementation
What Broke Going from 6 to 16 People
When we had 6 people, it was sufficient to simply "record attendance correctly." Timetac served its role well as an attendance management tool aligned with German labor law.
However, as our headcount grew, it became increasingly difficult to flexibly understand each employee's situation and review missing or incorrect attendance entries.
As background, our company faced the following situation:
| Situation | Challenge |
|---|---|
| One person handles all back office (BO) tasks such as HR, accounting, and payroll (+ 2 former staff providing support when needed) | Unable to keep up with attendance reviews as employee count increased, one person cannot handle all BO tasks, former staff cannot focus on their main work |
| The Managing Director (MD) of the German corporation, Shigahi, is the sole "supervisor" of all employees | Unable to fully grasp employees' situations or evaluate their work, employees find it difficult to consult the MD |
Since nearly everyone was juggling multiple different roles, it was difficult to divide into departments and delegate evaluation and workload management, which is why we had struggled to reorganize for so long.
Emerging HR and Labor Management Challenges
Last year, in addition to strengthening our dedicated back office structure, we introduced a team system where team leaders handle attendance reviews and situation monitoring.
While the problem was resolved by having team leaders serve as a hub between BO and the MD, the back office challenges that had been put off came to the forefront.
Timetac was a perfectly adequate tool for managing attendance with a small team, but the various tasks associated with it—creating HR documents, managing information, and so on—were handled manually or with separate tools and in-house automation, leading to task silos and complexity.
Personio was selected as the solution that could address all of these issues together.
Personio vs Timetac Comparison
Here is a comparison of features.
While Timetac specializes in attendance management, Personio covers both attendance and HR comprehensively.
| Feature | Timetac | Personio |
|---|---|---|
| Attendance rule violation detection | Results clearly shown in reports | Flexible notification settings, employee warnings available (however, the 11-hour rest rule is not currently supported) |
| Leave & compensatory time off | Simple and integrated with attendance | Flexible and advanced settings, automatic daily/monthly proration |
| DATEV integration | Integration setup possible (described later) | Syncs attendance + HR data together, bulk retrieval and distribution of payslips |
| Employee data management | Limited, administrators only | Custom fields, section-based permissions for advanced management |
| Document creation & e-signatures | None | Template + e-signature included as standard (no DocuSign needed) |
| Organization & permissions | Department creation available | Flexible organization structure and role-based permissions |
| Other | Advanced AI assistant |
About Cost
Timetac uses a per-user pricing model focused on attendance, while Personio uses a quote-based model with a monthly fee per employee plus module add-ons, making the pricing structures different.
In terms of simple per-person unit cost, Personio, which covers all of HR, appears more expensive compared to Timetac, which covers only attendance.
However, when considering the total cost of ownership (TCO) including replaced tools and manual work, we were able to sufficiently justify the price difference by reducing our reliance on multiple tools and monthly manual tasks.
For the latest pricing, it is best to check Personio's pricing page or request a quote.
The Most Important Part: DATEV Integration
Our payroll processing is outsourced to an external accounting firm (Steuerberater), which processes it using DATEV Lohn & Gehalt (LuG).
Many companies in Germany use either DATEV LuG or LODAS, so being able to smoothly transfer the necessary internal attendance and HR data to DATEV is of the utmost importance.
Challenges with Integration During the Timetac Era
Easy automatic DATEV integration in Timetac only appeared very recently (from March 2026 onwards), and before that, only DATEV-compatible exports were available.
At our company, we would export attendance reports and sick leave/vacation data as PDFs only when needed, and submit them to the accounting firm.
↓ Leave days report screen
Furthermore, since Timetac specializes in attendance, it could only handle limited fields (such as addresses), and only administrators could register data.
Other personal data required for payroll was managed separately, so any changes had to be reported manually to the accounting firm.
As a result, as the number of employees increased, this became a breeding ground for errors.
This separation of "attendance and HR" is the biggest difference from Personio, which will be described later.
Setup in Personio
The DATEV integration setup requires configuration on both the DATEV and Personio sides in coordination with the accounting firm's staff, but the documentation is well-organized.
You can import the DATEV master data export file into Personio, so basic employee data can be registered in bulk.
Among employee data, linkage with master data becomes possible through "whether to include in German payroll" and "DATEV employee number."
In other words, employees with contract categories different from German payroll or employees outside Germany can be excluded.
Monthly DATEV Integration Tasks
Once setup is complete, changes to employee data such as addresses, transfer destinations, and bank accounts, as well as recorded sick leave and vacation, are displayed in summary for each configured period in the Payroll menu.
The operator ① approves the payroll for that period, ② generates 2 reports for DATEV, and ③ presses the send to DATEV button — submission complete ✅
Press the Send to DATEV button; the third file has already been synced
After payroll processing is complete, documents such as payslips can then be imported into Personio as electronic data.
The operator ① presses the import button, ② presses the distribute button — payslips are automatically stored in each individual's folder ✅
Just press Retrieve/Distribute on the same Payroll Documents screen
There is no need to unzip the imported zip file, and the individual payslip files inside are automatically distributed by linking them to employee numbers.
Even if a user accidentally deletes an individual payslip file that was distributed to them, the zip file remains as the master copy, so there is no need to worry.
Summary
Personio experienced rapid growth during the COVID era (5-6 years ago) and established itself as the top solution for "European small and medium-sized enterprises," and in recent years has also been focusing on efficiency and AI.
In using it, we still notice some functional "gaps" stemming from layers of design decisions that feel less like software built for large global enterprises — but overall, we were left with the impression that it properly complies with European tax laws and regulations while being optimized for German companies, providing all the necessary features and continuing to develop new ones.
In this series, we will introduce the HR and labor management challenges our company solved using Personio, with screenshots.
We plan to cover the following topics going forward.
- Attendance and leave management
- Notifications and automation
- Creation of HR documents
- Organization and permission design, and more.
The DATEV integration introduced this time is something other tools like Timetac are also beginning to support, but the ability to comprehensively manage attendance, HR, and payroll data and send and receive data with the accounting firm in just a few clicks is a strength of Personio.
For back offices at small-scale locations, this consolidation can be a major deciding factor in switching.
On the other hand, detailed setup items and initial data preparation (mapping) require proactive coordination between the company and the accounting firm.
Classmethod Europe provides support for back office operations and system integration at European locations, drawing on our own hands-on operational expertise. Please feel free to reach out to us.