Hello,
and happy new year everyone!
As I just worked on the December accounting, and would like to restructure things in 2026 further to avoid bus factors, I’ve documented the steps, and I am happy to share with the community.
The below part is about the preparation of the accounting - some insight on the review (VAT filing, ledgers, translation) comes at a later time.
Florian
Data storage
We upload the documents to Nextcloud and the accountant has direct access to the relevant folders. For the preparation, the main thing that needs doing is to upload invoices and receipts. The majority is sent to TDF via e-mail to two different addresses. Unfortunately, not all vendors support accounting recipients different from the main contact, and others we have to download manually, as the vendors do not support e-mailing invoices at all.
Filename scheme
The documents are gathered in the Nextcloud folder per area, i.e. the cashboxes, the invoices, the bank statements etc. For the filenames, we use YYYYMMDD-ZZ.pdf, with the date being the invoice date (and if there is none, which would be unusual, the stamp on the document, or the scan date of the file). Several folders have subfolders for the respective year, to make finding receipts easier and not end up with hundreds of documents in one structure.
Sometimes we have an invoice and a payment receipt. In this case, we keep the filename the same, but add a little a, b, c … at the end, i.e. YYYYMMDD-ZZa.pdf. We do the same for attachments like timesheets.
Some of our invoices, primarily those from one of our hosting providers, have a TXT file attached with further details. It gets the same filename as the related PDF document.
Timeframe
For the invoices, relevant is only what was paid during a specific month (“Ist-Versteuerer” is the technical term). Usually, these are invoices from the very last days of the month, until the last day of the month. There are two exceptions: Invoices from two of our hosting providers often date to the first of the month, but were actually padi by credit card before.
Some invoices (e.g. payroll provider and tax consultant) explicitly mention when the payment will be taken from our bank account. Should that be in the following month, we upload only then.
For some statistics, we have approximately 40-50 invoices per month.
Bank account statements
All bank account statements are provicded digitally as PDF in the bank’s online portal, once per month, including the credit card statements. We download them and put them into the respective folders, renaming them as per the above filename scheme. Filename is based on the date of the statement.
Cashboxes
The cashboxes are uploaded automatically be the respective owners. We need the receipts in PDF, as well as an annual journal in ODT and PDF format. Filename scheme for the journal is YYYYMM-ZZ.pdf, starting with -01 for the first journal sheet. The sheet is updated/overwritten with the current version, we don’t use a new sheet per month, only per year.
Travel forms
For travel forms, we don’t have a naming scheme yet, but I would like to update TSP to provide that. We upload all the receipts as well as the signed request to the respective Nextclouid folder. As filename reference, we use the date when the form was signed, not when the event took place, as the former is more likely to be close to the payment date (see also here for changes we want to introduce from this year on).
Employment agency receipts
For one employment agency (for foreign countries), unfortunately, the format of the invoices has changed repeatedly, and we need to download them from their website. The form we currently use is the document showing “Receipt” on top. For the moment, there is one PDF per employee to download, with a breakdown of the costs. Also the position in the web UI has changed several times, for the moment the documents can be found at Finance - Payment History - Bulk Download. Getting the proper timeframe is a bit tricky due to the delay between invoice and payment, but usually it works to go with the first line that has “money received” in the month, up to the first days “money received” of the following month. If something is missing, the accountant will ask.
Social media provider receipts
Our social media provider doesn’t send invoices via e-mail. We need to download them once per month, I usually ask the team member in charge to send it to us.
Hosting provider receipts
One of our hosting providers doesn’t send invoices via e-mail anymore. We need to download them once per month, I usually ask the team member in charge to send it to us.
AI provider receipts
Our AI provider doesn’t send invoices via e-mail. We need to download them once per month, I usually do this myself. As we pay per user, setting up an account just to download invoices would cost us money. Also, their AI itself tells me they cannot send them via email…
Payroll
I upload the payroll directly to the tax consultant each month, as access to these documents is restricted for obvious reasons.