GoBD, TSE and KassenSichV: a plain-English guide for German restaurants

If you run a restaurant, cafe or bar in Germany, you've probably heard the acronyms GoBD, TSE and KassenSichV thrown around - usually without much explanation of what they actually mean for your till.

KassenSichV requires every electronic cash register system to be protected by a certified technical security element, or TSE. In practice, this means every sale your system records gets signed and logged in a way that can't be silently altered afterward - the TSE is the hardware or cloud service that does that signing, and its logs are what a tax auditor checks first.

GoBD is broader: it's the general set of principles for how businesses must keep digital records - completeness, immutability, and the ability to export them cleanly for a tax advisor or auditor (usually as a DSFinV-K export). It applies to every till system, not just restaurants, but restaurants tend to feel it most because of split bills, tips, discounts and voided orders - all of which need to be traceable.

One important nuance that's easy to miss: if a restaurant only accepts card or app payments and never touches cash, some of the TSE/Kassenfunktion obligations genuinely don't apply, because there's no cash drawer to secure. That exemption only holds as long as nothing changes - the moment a restaurant adds a cash option or a manual 'mark as paid' override, the obligation is back.

The responsibility split that trips people up: your POS provider is responsible for building a system that can produce compliant, TSE-signed receipts and clean exports. You, as the restaurant operator, are responsible for actually keeping those records for the legally required retention period and providing them if a Finanzamt asks. A good POS makes that second part easy - it doesn't do it for you automatically forever.

None of this is legal advice - for your specific setup, talk to a Steuerberater. But if you understand these three pieces (TSE = tamper-evident signing, GoBD = general record-keeping principles, KassenSichV = the law that requires the TSE), the acronyms stop being scary and start being a checklist.