Haufe Group is already a market leader in enterprise management and accounting for small and midsize businesses (SMB) and freelancers with its Lexware brand. Now, the company is further strengthening its market position by acquiring a stake in Kontist.

The combination of accounting and a financial solution offers companies a new and innovative way of automating all their administrative processes through a single platform. Not only does this lighten the load on entrepreneurs, but it also drives the digitalization of SMBs.

Times remain tough for the self-employed in Germany: The bureaucratic and administrative hurdles are high and software for managing small businesses invariably comes in the form of standalone solutions. But help is at hand from Haufe Group and its powerful Lexware brand, which provides a platform on which SMBs can manage all their business processes for accounting, banking, and tax. Kontist is a key component on the road toward the end-to-end automation of business processes via a central ecosystem. This latest move increases Haufe Group’s focus on the almost 4.3 million SMBs and the growing freelancer community in Germany.

“With our stake in Kontist, we’re taking another step forward for our customers – toward automating all their business processes and meeting their tax requirements. Entrepreneurs and freelancers no longer have to separate accounting and banking. Instead, they can manage their processes and their company just-in-time through a single platform solution. We’re therefore making a decisive contribution to driving the transformation of small and midsize businesses,” says Markus Reithwiesner, Holding Director Haufe Group.

The two partners’ first task together will be an in-depth technical integration of the online accounting software lexoffice and the Kontist bank account. Users will then profit from automated accounting, a real-time estimate of tax payments due, and an integrated Mastercard for expenditure management. This combination will create a completely new user experience.

What’s more, Haufe Group and Kontist are setting up a co-creation lab to develop innovative digital products. The objective is to rethink the business workflows of SMBs and streamline them by integrating different services and partners on one platform. The search is on for more partners from the financial sector to help realize this vision.