Accountable Review 2026: German Taxes in English, Tested

What is Accountable?

German taxes are hard enough in German. For the hundreds of thousands of international freelancers working in Germany, they are a genuine barrier: the official ELSTER portal is German-only, tax advisors charge €800–2,500 a year, and most accounting tools assume you read German fluently. Accountable attacks exactly this gap — a tax and accounting app that handles VAT returns (Umsatzsteuer-Voranmeldung), the EÜR profit statement and the income tax declaration in English, and files them directly with ELSTER.

Founded in Brussels in 2017 and live in Germany since 2020, Accountable holds a PSD2 license from the Belgian National Bank (its German business is supervised by BaFin) and serves more than 40,000 self-employed people in Germany. In Belgium, the majority of digital VAT filings by the self-employed already run through it.

Filing German taxes without speaking German

The core workflow: Accountable asks you guided questions in plain English, calculates your VAT return, EÜR or income tax declaration, runs plausibility checks — and transmits the result directly to ELSTER via its own authenticated interface. No ELSTER certificate, no German-only portal, no tax advisor required for standard cases. The built-in AI tax advisor (Taxes plan and up) answers everyday questions — "Is this trip deductible?", "How do I book this receipt?" — from a knowledge base curated by real tax advisors.

The tax guarantee

Accountable backs its calculations with a tax guarantee: if a software error in the app's logic causes a back payment or penalty, Accountable covers it — up to €500 per filing on the Taxes plan, up to €10,000 on Max. It explicitly does not cover your own input mistakes, so it's not insurance against any tax surprise — but it is a strong signal of confidence in the calculation engine, and unique in this market.

Pricing: from free invoicing to full tax autopilot

The Free plan is genuinely useful: unlimited e-invoices (XRechnung, ZUGFeRD, Peppol — mandatory formats in Germany) plus 5 booked expenses a month. Invoicing (€9.90/month, yearly) adds recurring invoices and payment reminders; Accounting (€19.90) brings OCR receipt capture, DATEV export and EÜR preparation. The sweet spot is Taxes (€29.90): direct ELSTER filing, the AI advisor and the €500 guarantee. Max (€59.90) raises the guarantee to €10,000 and adds quarterly calls with a tax advisor. Every paid plan has a 14-day full-access trial without a credit card. As of June 2026 — promotional discounts rotate frequently.

Who is Accountable worth it for?

If you are an expat or international freelancer paying taxes in Germany, Accountable is close to a default recommendation — the English-language ELSTER filing alone justifies it. It equally suits German solo freelancers who want to drop their tax advisor. It is not built for corporations (UG/GmbH need balance-sheet accounting), and if you work continuously with a Steuerberater, a suite with a deeper DATEV bridge fits better — see our accounting tools comparison.

What we like about Accountable and what we don't