You can retrieve the electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU, also called eAttest) via your payroll program, for example. Keep two things in mind when retrieving it:
-
As an employer, you are legally required to retrieve the eAttest only if an employee has informed you that the doctor’s office has issued an eAU.
-
Several days may pass between your retrieval of the eAU from the health insurer and the eAU actually arriving at the employer.
For this reason, it makes sense to let employees indicate on sickness entries whether the doctor’s office has issued an eAttest. HR should be able to record whether the eAttest has already been requested. And finally, you should record that the employer has received the eAttest.
The information about whether the eAttest has been received by the employer is already stored automatically for all sickness entries. Read here how to change the certificate status for a sickness entry.
You can add the other two pieces of information using the extra fields feature in Timebutler. You can define any extra fields for each absence type. For the Sickness absence type, create one or more extra fields, for example:
- “eAttest issued by the doctor’s office”, Type: yes/no selection, entered by the employee
- “eAttest requested from the health insurer”, Type: yes/no selection, entered by the admin/HR
Read here how to set up extra fields.
Read here how to retrieve the electronic certificate of incapacity for work.
Note
The electronic certificate of incapacity for work (eAU / eAttest) is specific to Germany and is part of the German statutory health insurance system (gesetzliche Krankenkassen). The general approach described above — letting employees flag that a certificate has been issued, tracking the request status, and recording when the certificate is received — can be adapted to similar sick-leave certification processes in other countries by using the extra fields feature accordingly.