An employee on sick leave: the salary certificate within 5 days

An employee sends in their sick leave one morning, by text to their manager or straight to the right department if there is one. The employer has five days, no more, to send the salary certificate to the health insurance fund through an event-based DSN filing, two days for a work accident. Past that deadline, it isn't always the company that waits: it's the employee, or the company itself if it kept paying the salary while waiting to be reimbursed.

What the law requires#

A salary certificate is owed for any leave tied to sickness, maternity, paternity and childcare, adoption, or a work accident and occupational illness, including a leave of a single day.

Two situations, two clocks:

• The health insurance fund pays daily allowances directly to the employee. The employer sends the salary data through an event-based DSN filing within five days of learning of the leave.
• The employer keeps paying the salary and gets reimbursed (subrogation). It must be sent as soon as the leave is received, at the latest with the monthly DSN for the month concerned: not five days of leeway, but the current month.

For a work accident, the recommended deadline drops to 48 hours. An employee with several employers gets a certificate from each one, independently of the others.

Why this deadline gets lost in the field#

A sick leave rarely reaches the person who handles payroll in person. On a job site, it passes through a site supervisor before reaching the office. In a warehouse, a driver sends a photo of it by text from the pharmacy. Each handoff adds a day, sometimes two, before the document reaches whoever has to file it.

In a multi-site company, this handoff repeats with every single leave, with as many chances to lose a day along the way. The legal clock starts when the employer learns of the leave, not when the payroll department receives it: an internal delay in passing it on shortens the real margin by just as much.

What a delay costs#

Without subrogation, a delay in filing delays the daily allowances paid to the employee: they are the one waiting on income, for a document the company could have sent sooner.

With subrogation, it's the company that advances the money for longer. Take a company with around a hundred employees, with an assumption of six leaves a year covered by subrogation, an average net daily wage of €60, and an average delay of ten days between receiving the leave and actually filing it. Each case stretches the advance by €600 over ten extra days: over a year, that is up to €2,000 tied up longer than if the certificate had gone out the same day.

Three moves to never miss a deadline#

1. Date the reception the same day, whatever the channel: paper handed over in person, a photo sent by text, a letter arriving at the office.
2. Check whether subrogation applies to that employee before relying on the five days: with subrogation, it has to go out as soon as received, not at the edge of the deadline.
3. Confirm the event-based DSN filing actually went out, and wasn't just logged waiting for the next monthly DSN.

What changes with an application built for the business#

As soon as a leave is received in the field, it is photographed and time-stamped in the same place as hours and absences, with an alert to whoever handles the filings. The legal countdown, five days or 48 hours depending on the case, stays visible until it is filed, and the subrogation box is ticked at the moment of entry rather than at the moment of doubt.

Unreported absences only discovered at payroll and payroll data that always arrives late come from the same problem: information that exists in the field from day one, but takes time to travel up. See also what schedule and time tracking built for the business can automate.

What not to do#

Do not try to replace the DSN filing itself: it stays done by the payroll software or the accounting firm, with their own rules and updates. What gets won here is the time between the leave being received in the field and reaching the right person, not the filing itself.

The salary certificate: the key takeaways#

The legal deadline is not negotiable, but it starts at a moment the company only partly controls: learning of the leave, not filing it with the right department. Dating every reception the same day, and telling subrogation cases apart, is enough to take back control of that clock.

In a multi-site company, the same lost handoff shows up for every piece of information born in the field before reaching the office: hours, premiums, and sick leaves are just one example among others.