The cash register documentation of 640 service areas under control

The 640 service and rest stations on the German motorway network, much like restaurants or pharmacies, have a very high proportion of customers paying in cash. This puts them in the spotlight of the tax authorities, who assume that cash transactions in particular often involve tax-relevant violations.

The problem is made worse by the fact that service areas book high turnover, in some cases several hundred thousand purchases per year, across different cash register systems. Even the smallest irregularities detected during tax audits can lead to enormous back taxes and penalties, and have already done so in the past.

The tax auditors have an easy job, because they focus on the legally required GoBD-compliant archiving of cash register data. Using special audit software, they can easily analyse this data both systematically and in terms of content and detect inconsistencies such as missing receipt numbers or questionable cancellation entries, over a period of several years.

So in tax audits, the operators of the service areas always face the problem that, despite proper bookkeeping, there are practically always transactions in the cash register data that could be problematic from a tax point of view.

How do you get the cash register documentation of 640 service areas all over Germany under control in one go, and in a way that holds up under tax law in the long term? Our idea: with the know-how of our auditors, we develop a cloud-based digital archive which, as a first step, reads the tax-relevant data from all registers at every service and rest station nationwide every night and stores it with us in an audit-proof and unalterable way, in line with the legal requirements for retaining accounting records, in other words GoBD-compliant.

As a second step, the transferred data undergoes an automated content check, just like the one tax auditors carry out with their IDEA audit software.

This demanding task, both in terms of tax law and technology, is implemented in modules. Module 1 connects the different cash register systems via interfaces to our central archive, into which the cash register data is transferred and archived in a GoBD-compliant way every night. Module 2 uses the IDEA software, also used by tax auditors, to check the cash register data for inconsistencies at short intervals, both in content and systematically, and informs the customer of any anomalies. Finally, module 3 archives all of the customer's email traffic, again GoBD-compliant, of course.