Every till in German gastronomy has been legally required to have a certified security module — the TSE — since 2020, along with tamper-proof record keeping and a receipt for every transaction. Whatever you think of the paperwork, it has one genuinely useful side effect: your sales history is being recorded properly, in detail, whether you use it or not.
The catch is that "recorded" and "available to you" are different things.
This is a practical guide, not legal advice — for anything about your own obligations, ask your Steuerberater.
What your till is definitely storing
Because it has to be: every transaction, with time, items, payment method, VAT, and an unbroken sequence. It is being kept for years, in a standardised export format designed for tax auditors.
So when a software vendor tells you they cannot get your history, what they usually mean is that they have not built a connection to your particular till. The data exists.
The three ways to get it out
The export. Every compliant system can produce a data export. It is designed for an audit rather than for you, so it is verbose and awkward, but it contains everything and you are entitled to it. Most modern tills have a "DSFinV-K" or "Kassenexport" option somewhere in the back office.
The daily report. The Z-Bericht or its equivalent. Far less detail, but it has the number that actually matters for forecasting: how much you took, on which day, across how many transactions. A photo of your daily report contains most of what a demand forecast needs.
A direct connection. Some systems have a proper interface. The larger and more international the system, the more likely it is — and the more likely you are paying for a tier that includes it.
The uncomfortable pattern
Here is the thing worth knowing if you are shopping for software.
The tills that connect easily are the ones aimed at chains with a back office. The tills that a single Berlin café actually runs — orderbird, ready2order, Tillhub and the rest — are the ones almost no hospitality software in this market has bothered to connect to.
That is why so many tools you get pitched cannot support you. It is not that your till is bad or unusual. It is that you are not the customer that vendor built for.
What you actually need for a forecast
Much less than people assume. To predict how busy you will be, you need per day:
- how many covers or transactions you did
- how much you took
- how many delivery orders, kept separate
- whether you were open at all
That is four numbers a day. Everything else — item-level detail, payment splits, receipt sequences — is useful for other purposes and irrelevant here.
Which is why we let you type them in. Twenty seconds at the end of the night, from a report your till is producing anyway, and you get exactly the same forecast as a venue with a direct connection. There is no lesser version.
Three things worth doing regardless of software
Get an export of your own history and keep a copy. If you ever change till provider, migrate systems, or fall out with a supplier, that history is the most valuable thing you own and the easiest to lose.
Check what happens to your data if you cancel. Some providers make export straightforward. Some make it a support ticket. Find out before you need to know.
Ask any vendor how they get your data, in that specific direction. "We integrate with your POS" is not an answer. "We connect to your system, and here is what happens if we do not" is.
Your numbers are yours, they are being kept properly by law, and getting them working for you is easier than most software would have you believe.