In accordance with § 11 (2) of the German Foreign Trade and Payments Act (AWG) in conjunction with sections 64 et seq. and §§ 67 et seq. of the German Foreign Trade and Payments Act (AWV), payments to or from non-residents are to be recorded. These payments are to be reported to the Bundesbank (balance of payments) monthly as defined in the Bundesbank’s list of services.

Especially the transaction notifications per Annex Z4 to the AWV pose challenges for companies, because, on the one hand, the legal requirements are not always interpreted correctly, which makes it difficult to identify any business transactions that are relevant to the notification and their correct mapping to key figures. On the other hand, companies often have the option of automatically deriving key figures from the flow of credit and debit receipts. However, a high degree of automation is usually indispensable to meeting the legal requirements with an acceptable amount of effort. In this context, transit business poses a particular challenge. Here there is usually – at least systematically – only limited information for a system-supported derivation of the different transit indicators. No later than when it comes to corporate structures with separate legal entities distributed on different systems a comprehensive and integrated Z4 reporting should be considered to minimize manual effort for data consolidation and postprocessing.