Tax and bookkeeping

Three groups, one country, one order of precedence#

A dish does not carry its VAT rate but its tax group: food, drink or alcohol. That is the same question everywhere in Europe, and it can be answered in a second. Which percentage comes out of it is set once, on the business - per group, once for eating in and once for takeaway.

The suggestion for those rates comes from your country. The 27 EU states plus Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the United Kingdom, Norway and Iceland are on file. We read the country from your address; the top of the tab says which one we recognised, and you can change it there.

Alcohol is a group of its own because nine European countries tax it differently from the lemonade next to it: Austria, France, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Ireland, Sweden, Greece and Luxembourg. Lump the two together and every wine is booked wrong.

A single dish or a category can still carry its own percentage. It is the exception and it beats the group. So the lookup is: own rate on the dish, own rate on the category, group of the dish, group of the category, otherwise food.

You find all of it under Settings > Tax & accounting. The group of a single dish is also in the menu, on the dish itself.

• ⚠️ An empty percentage field means “take the group”, not “exempt”.
• ⚠️ Leaving drinks and alcohol empty means “like food”. Until you enter something there, everything calculates with the food rate - deliberately so, to make sure nothing changes by itself on a business that is already set up.
• If nothing is set anywhere, the line stays without a rate in the export. That is deliberately empty and not 0 %: “not entered” and “exempt” are two different statements.
• The top of the tab says how many dishes currently fall into that gap. While there is a number there, something is missing from the export.
• ⚠️ The country table is a suggestion with a date next to it, not tax advice. VAT rates change; for five countries only the standard rate is on file, and the tab says so.

Drinks and alcohol are suggested#

So the menu does not have to be walked through by hand, Flavoso sorts it while reading it: every dish is proposed as food, drink or alcohol. A category inherits the proposal when every dish in it is sorted the same way; individual dishes travel with it, because not every menu has categories and because a „Drinks“ category also holds the wine. Individual dishes come along because not every menu has categories - and because a category called “drinks” also holds the wine.

⚠️ Suggested, not set. Next to every row there is a picker in which you change the group or leave the row alone. A guessed VAT rate is not wrong the way a typo is wrong: it does not stand out, it then sits in the bookkeeping, and you see it at the audit.

The sorting happens while the menu is read, by the same step that reads names, prices and allergens. A menu you typed by hand is sorted afterwards, when the window opens. In both cases every row says where its proposal came from.

Dishes named after a drink stay food: a coffee cream cake, a wine soup or a red wine jus. The other way round, an alcohol-free beer stays a drink and is not taxed as alcohol.

Gross stays gross#

⚠️ Your prices stay gross prices. That is required (German price indication rules), so the tax is taken out of the price and never added on top. What the guest sees is the final price, before and after.

⚠️ The rate is frozen onto the line when the order is placed. Change it later and the change applies from then on, not retroactively: an order from last month keeps the rate that applied back then. Without that, every adjustment would rewrite every old receipt.

It is calculated per line and then summed, not on the order total. With mixed rates that gives a different result than the sum of the lines, and then receipt and export contradict each other by a few cents nobody can trace.

• ⚠️ Flavoso does not give tax advice. The suggestion per country is a head start; which rate applies to your food and drinks is your tax advisor's call.
• The AI menu import does NOT guess the rate. New dishes get the business default.
• The data export shows the rate and the tax amount for every line. That is in every plan.

The DATEV posting batch#

From Premium you can download one month as a finished EXTF file that your German tax advisor imports straight into DATEV. You find it under Export, in the box “For your bookkeeping”.

What gets posted is the daily takings: one posting per day, payment route and VAT rate. A restaurant with eighty orders a day therefore delivers four lines instead of eighty, which is exactly how a tax advisor posts a till as well.

⚠️ Without your advisor's details there is no file. Consultant and client number are on every letter from them, and the account numbers hang off THEIR chart of accounts. Made-up values would not be half a help but a file somebody passes on.

1. 1

   Enter the numbers

   Copy the consultant number and client number from a letter of your tax advisor. Plus the start of your fiscal year, almost always 1 January.

   Dashboard, Settings, Tax & accounting

2. 2

   Pick the chart of accounts

   SKR03, SKR04 or SKR70 (hotels and restaurants) fill the accounts in with one click. Which one your advisor keeps, only they know: ask once and it is settled.

   same tab

3. 3

   Check the accounts

   One revenue account per VAT rate, plus the contra accounts for paid on site and paid online, the tips account and the clearing account. The suggestions are suggestions.

   same tab

4. 4

   Download the month

   Pick the month, download, hand the file to your advisor. Show them the first batch before letting them post it.

   Dashboard, Export

Anything without a rate does not vanish#

Amounts that had no VAT rate stored at the time of the order go to their own clearing account and carry it in the posting text. They are not left out.

The reason is the total: what is in the file has to match to the cent what the guests paid. Daily takings that do not match the till are the first point of any audit, and a file with something silently missing is worse than one with a visible gap.

This mostly affects orders from before you set your rates. Cancelled orders, by contrast, are not included at all: they are not revenue. They remain in the order export.

The process documentation (GoBD)#

At a German cash inspection the auditor asks for it: a description of the systems you use to produce tax-relevant data. The GoBD require it, and whoever cannot produce anything has a problem.

Flavoso builds it for you as a PDF, under Export, with one click. It is rebuilt on every download and describes your business as it is set up today: your order channels, your payment routes, your VAT rates, the number of people with access.

⚠️ It covers the ordering system, not your whole business. What your till does, what happens to the cash, how the receipt under § 146a AO is issued and where the paper receipts sit, you have to add yourself. The document has a section that tells you exactly what that is.

It is included in EVERY plan and it is in German, because the GoBD are German law.

• Rebuild it when something about your processes changes. Do not throw the old version away, file it: the changes have to stay traceable.
• Sign it. The document has a line for that at the end, because it describes your processes and not our claim about them.
• ⚠️ It is not tax advice. Whether it is enough for your business is your tax advisor's call.