Register every till with the Finanzamt by 31 July

The Mitteilungspflicht under § 146a Abs. 4 AO — the duty to report every electronic recording system to your tax office — has existed on paper since 2020. The tax administration never had a system to receive the reports, so it was suspended. That changed on 1 January 2025, when the ELSTER portal and the ERiC interface opened for submissions. A letter from the Federal Ministry of Finance in June 2024 set the timetable, and the first hard deadline lands in three weeks.

What you must do, and by when

• Every register or POS acquired before 1 July 2025 must be reported by 31 July 2025.
• Every register acquired from 1 July 2025 must be reported within one month of acquisition.
• Every register taken out of service from 1 July 2025 must be reported within one month — and you can only deregister a device that was registered first.
• Devices scrapped before 1 July 2025 that were never registered do not need a report.

The report is per device, not per business. A restaurant with a main till, a bar till and two handheld order terminals connected to the same TSE reports each device. EU taximeters and odometers fall under a parallel rule.

What goes into the report

For each device: your tax number, the Betriebsstätte — the branch or location it belongs to — the type of system, the manufacturer, model, serial number, software and version, the acquisition date and, where applicable, the decommissioning date, plus the TSE details: serial number, BSI certification ID, type, and activation date.

Most of this is printed on the TSE packaging, available in your POS settings screen, or — if your vendor implemented the export correctly — readable from the Stamm_Kassen and Stamm_TSE tables of your DSFinV-K export.

Three ways to submit

1. Manually in Mein ELSTER. Fill in the form "Mitteilung über elektronische Aufzeichnungssysteme (§ 146a Abs. 4 AO)". Fine for one or two devices; painful beyond that.
2. XML upload in Mein ELSTER. Your POS or your tax advisor's software generates the XML; you upload it.
3. Direct submission via ERiC from software that integrates the interface — no portal visit at all.

Your Steuerberater can file on your behalf. Many are offering this as a fixed-price service this month; ask.

Why it matters beyond the deadline

The tax administration now has, for the first time, a central list of which registers exist, where, and with which TSE. Expect future Kassen-Nachschauen to be targeted using this data: a location that reports no register but visibly takes cash will be an obvious candidate. Conversely, a clean registration is a small piece of evidence that you run an orderly operation.

For developers and integrators

If you ship POS software to German customers, your roadmap this year should include the registration flow — otherwise every one of your customers is filling in ELSTER forms by hand, and you are the one they call when the TSE serial number does not validate.

Option A — generate the ELSTER XML. The schema for the § 146a Abs. 4 report is published by the tax administration. Your system already holds most fields; the missing ones are usually the customer's tax number and the Betriebsstätte identifier. Generate the XML, let the customer or their advisor upload it.

Option B — integrate ERiC. ERiC, the ELSTER Rich Client, is the library the tax administration provides for direct transmission. It requires a certificate-based identity for the submitting party and some integration effort. Worth it if you have hundreds of registers under management.

Option C — use your TSE provider's submission API. fiskaly added a Submission API alongside SIGN DE specifically for this obligation. Because fiskaly already knows every TSS and client you created, the registration payload is largely pre-filled; your system supplies the business identifiers, and fiskaly handles the transmission through ERiC. For cloud-POS vendors already on fiskaly, this is by far the fastest route.

Data you must have per device, ready to serialise:

• Device serial or ID — POS configuration, Stamm_Kassen.KASSE_SERIENNR.
• Manufacturer, model, software version — POS build metadata.
• Acquisition or commissioning date — your licensing or provisioning record.
• TSE serial number — the TSE response, Stamm_TSE.TSE_SERIAL.
• TSE BSI certification ID — the TSE certificate or the provider API.
• TSE activation date — the provider API, created_at on the TSS.
• Betriebsstätte — customer master data.

Build the report once, expose it as a button — "Register with Finanzamt" — and make the decommissioning path, the Außerbetriebnahme, just as easy. The one-month window applies there too.

This is general information, not legal or tax advice.

Daleenda helps POS vendors and multi-site operators automate § 146a reporting via ELSTER XML, ERiC or fiskaly's Submission API.

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