Companies are increasingly outsourcing services that is why the number of self-employed workers in Germany has been rising. The total number of self-employed workers rose from 3.5 million in 1994 to around 4.7 million in 2018 (Source: thelocal.de)
Sibylle Strack presented Kontist (an online bank for freelancers in Germany) during CEE20 SME Banking Club Conference and shared their experience in working with that segment of SMEs and solving their pain points.
TO FILE THE TAXES RIGHT
Kontist organized a survey among their customers and found out that the biggest problem for freelancers was getting the taxes right. Freelancers who decided to get professional help estimated that they spend around EUR 2 500 a year for the tax advisors’ service.
In October 2020, Kontist was awarded by one of the biggest business newspapers in Germany – Handelsblatt – for launching the best business bank account in combination with accounting software. For example, the users of that bank account could see which amount should be reserved for taxes, so the tax payments could be fulfilled properly. But during the COVID-19 Kontist received many inquiries from their customers about employing tax advisors as, for example, some of the state aid could be addressed only by tax advisors. That is why Kontist decided to update the existing product and started aiming at merging and combining the banking, accounting, and tax advisory for the freelancers.
THE NEW APP WILL TAKE CARE OF FREELANCER’ TAXES AND MORE
In July 2020, a dedicated tax service was launched. Now the only thing that the customers need to do is to use a banking app that they are already familiar with because it has been in use for the last three years. Kontist is taking care of all the matters related to the taxes. For that reason, Kontist employed the service advisers (who can always answer the customers’ questions) and built the backbone of the service (using also the AI and machine learning algorithm to train the system). Now the customers do not need to remember about filing the taxes monthly, quarterly, or yearly as all of that is done for them. The customers shall only scan and upload the receipts to the app.
The product turned out to be so popular and so needful that more applicants were willing to take the advantage of the product.
Watch the full presentation about the service below:
