Business Software for the DACH Region

You set the vacation year and the point of expiry per rule and activate the rule per employee. Different models then run side by side within one company. More on this in vacation management.

Special forms of working time can be handled separately, for example absences under Austrian rules or driving times of driver and co-driver. The basics are on the working time recording page.

Vacation rules, break rules and public holiday calendars are set up centrally once. They are assigned through the individual employee's contract data, together with weekly working hours, vacation days and the expiry setting. Each of these records carries a valid-from date and, where needed, a valid-to date, so several periods follow one another.

That covers the cases rigid systems fail at: an employee works in France for a year and then comes to Germany, or moves within Germany to a federal state with different public holidays. You add a new period starting from the move. From then on the new rules and the new public holiday calendar apply, while the months before it stay under the previous ones. Nobody needs a second employee record for this, and reporting across the full year stays correct.

The minimum break is one of the points where countries diverge noticeably. In Germany, 30 minutes apply from more than six hours of working time and 45 minutes from more than nine hours. Austria likewise requires 30 minutes from more than six hours, but allows the break to be split into shorter parts. Switzerland staggers more finely and starts at a quarter of an hour from more than five and a half hours, up to a full hour from more than nine hours. In France it is 20 consecutive minutes as soon as daily working time reaches six hours.

In projectfacts you map this with break rules, and you can have any number of them. Each rule is a table with two columns, valid from working time and minimum break, and it takes any number of steps. The German requirement sits in it as two rows, 6:00 hours with 30 minutes and 9:00 hours with 45 minutes. The Swiss staggering simply gets one row more, the French one manages with a single row. So you set up a separate rule per country and assign it through the employee's contract data, along with the vacation rule and the public holiday calendar. What applies to your company follows from the respective national law and from any works agreement. How breaks arise and are adjusted in day-to-day operation is covered on the working time recording page.

The stored public holiday calendar reaches at least two years into the future and reports back by itself when it runs out. National and regional holidays are maintained separately, so locations are mapped correctly.

A public holiday is not necessarily a whole day. Depending on country and region you keep it as a whole, half or quarter day, much as Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve are treated in many companies anyway. The deduction from the vacation account follows suit.

Where part days are common, a whole vacation day is not a small enough unit. In projectfacts, staff take vacation in parts as well, as a half or quarter day. The same applies to special leave and to taking time off in lieu of overtime.

In travel expense reports you take country-specific meal allowances and VAT rates into account.

Where the tax does not apply, you assign the reason its own contra account: services to other EU countries subject to a recapitulative statement, services to non-EU countries, sales taxed in another EU country, or another reason for exemption. The postings then arrive in the export already sorted. More on this on the invoicing page.

Every reason for exemption comes with a note on the invoice, for example on the reverse charge procedure under § 13b UStG. You store these texts in German, English and French. The matching text appears automatically as soon as the document carries the corresponding tax case.

On request, every invoice carries a payment code with which your customer prepares the transfer by scanning: GiroCode for the euro area, Swiss QR Code for Switzerland.

Every price list carries a currency and a language. You create as many price lists as you serve markets and assign them per customer, country or period.

The practical effect shows in a quote: switch there from the Switzerland/German price list to England/Pound and the entire document is immediately in the other language and with the prices of the other currency. Nobody builds a second quote, and nobody converts by hand. This applies to all languages and all configured currencies. How quotes are created otherwise is shown under quotation preparation.

You create as many currencies as you need. It is not only invoicing that supports currencies: projects have their own currency too, and payments to employees can be made in a different one. The department in Berlin can therefore plan in euros while head office in Zurich keeps the franc as its house currency.

So that nobody has to convert in their head, each user picks the currency in which figures and reports are displayed in their personal settings. The company's house currency is unaffected by this.

The history of exchange rates is stored. Invoices, projects and costs are therefore converted at the rate belonging to their date, not at today's. You enter rates accurate to six decimal places.

In their personal settings, each user defines language, time zone and country, plus the start of the week, the date format, whether times appear in 12 or 24 hours, the time format for hour values, and currency and currency format, meaning the separators for thousands and decimals.

The same report then reads in a familiar form for the colleague in Vienna, the colleague in Zurich and the team in the United States, without anyone maintaining a second set of data. The figures behind it stay the same.

Presentation includes the time zone. Every user stores their own, and lists, calendars and reports follow it. Recurring appointments spanning the change between summer and winter time are handled accordingly, even when participants sit in time zones without such a change. Calendar synchronisation via CalDAV supports time zones as well.

The subsidiary in the United States works in the same system as the parent company in Germany. Its staff enter and see everything in dollars and issue invoices in dollars with the tax rates that apply there. Head office looks at the same data in euros, including the revenue reports, converted at the rate applying on each date.

The house currency is the franc. The Berlin team still plans its projects in euros because it buys and invoices in euros. Both sides see reports in their familiar currency, without separate systems or intermediate spreadsheets.

A German consultancy invoices clients in Austria, Switzerland and the United States. Each tax case gets its own revenue account, the note on the reversal of tax liability appears automatically in the recipient's language, and the postings arrive sorted in the accounts.