Time and again we have noticed in conversations with our freelancers that there is a high demand for an English-speaking accounting solution with which you can easily complete your tax return afterwards. Therefore, we have decided to get another partner in the area of accounting software on board, and Accountable convinced us with their target group specific concept.
Die Mehrheit deutscher Unternehmen und Startups würde das Jahr 2020 verbunden mit dem erforderlichen Handlungsbedarf durch die COVID-19 Krise wohl als sehr herausfordernd bezeichnen. Welche Auswirkungen hat die Krise für Unternehmen und Freiberufler? Welche Vorteile können sich aber auch für Unternehmen ergeben?
We are happy to reactivate our cooperation with the Berlin-based FinTech startup Kontist. We are still big fans of their business bank account designed for freelancers! Nowadays they're offering even more and help you to stay on top of your business with real-time tax calculation, accounting integrations, and much more.
Recently we have noticed several discussions about accounting topics in our community.
The duties of a self-employed person include, besides the actual core project business, project acquisition as well as a variety of different administrative tasks such as accounting and taxes. For many freelancers, the accounting tasks are some of their least favorite ones. The simplest solution is, of course, to outsource the entire work to a tax consultant. However, if the tax consultant takes over all accounting tasks, you can expect relatively high costs. Thus a more pragmatic solution is to handle the preparatory accounting tasks yourself with the help of one of the various cloud-based accounting programs, and afterwards have it audited by a tax consultant.
There is hardly a market that is as intransparent and saturated as the insurance market. If you google "insurance for freelancers", you'll get 1.040.000 results in 0.42 seconds. Here you can see how confusing and enormous the market for insurance services is. The times in which a few large insurance providers dominated the market are over - more and more founders are starting to change this traditional market and "InsurTech" startups such as ottonova and Friendsurance are sprouting. One of these startups is our partner Exali, an insurance broker that offers custom-made insurance plans for freelancers.
Update: our cooperation with Vantik has ended in February 2022
Recently, some of our members have expressed the wish to learn more about different savings and retirement options for freelancers. A survey during our webinar also revealed that most of the attendees associated the words "confused" and "scared" with thinking about their pension. Since we also think that the market of pension offerings in Germany is diverse but non-transparent, we wanted to give our members a better overview so that everyone can decide individually on a pension strategy.
One of the features, that many members of our community have asked for over the years, was a way to "bookmark" certain posts from our Slack workspace to make it possible to find them again later.
We are happy to announce that this functionality has finally arrived in the form of our Community Wiki!
With our "Remote Community Meetup" concept we are already entering the 8th round. We came up with the idea, as it was no longer possible for us to meet face-to-face due to the Corona situation. We are very happy that freelancers can network with each other remotely and that we can exchange ideas with you in times of social distancing!
Organizing a webinar on a topic relevant to IT freelancers was something we have had in our backlog for a long time, and now we finally got around to it! 🎉
Our first webinar took place on April 30 and featured Claus Lahner, a lawyer experienced in the fields of IT law and contract law. We collected topic suggestions from the community beforehand and Claus could cover almost all of them during the webinar. We mainly discussed the various challenges in setting up a waterproof freelancer contract and questions regarding bogus self-employment ("Scheinselbständigkeit"). In the last part, the attendees had the chance to ask Claus follow-up questions.
Numerous companies have put current projects on hold and are trying to keep expenses as low as possible, which has had an immediate effect on the income of freelancers. In case you are one of them, you can find information about receiving government grants and loans here: