User Guide
All BauFin modules at a glance
Dashboard
The Dashboard provides a real-time overview of your construction business performance. See annual KPIs including revenue, expenses, and profit at a glance, with monthly revenue charts, top clients ranked by turnover, and alerts for overdue invoices that need attention.
Clients
Manage all your clients — construction companies, general contractors, property developers, and private homeowners. Store company details, addresses, tax IDs, and VAT numbers. Clients flagged as construction contractors can be used to prepare reverse-charge (§13b UStG) invoice hints for review.
Invoices
Create, send, and track invoices for construction work. Supports line items with various units (hours, m², lump sum, linear metres), reverse-charge hints for §13b contractors, collective invoices for multiple work orders, and PDF generation. Email delivery with attached PDF and time reports.
Expenses
Record all business expenses for your construction company. Categorize costs by type — materials, tools, vehicle, insurance, phone, office, travel, and other. Each expense feeds into your EÜR (income statement) and reduces your tax burden. Link receipts via OCR scanning.
Quotes
Create professional quotes for construction projects. Add line items with selling and cost prices to track planned margins. Send quotes to clients, track acceptance or rejection, and convert accepted quotes directly into work orders with one click.
Bank Statements
Import bank statements from CSV or MT940 files. The assistant prepares category suggestions for each transaction. The system detects income matched to invoices and expenses matched to categories, with confidence scores. Review, approve, or manually match transactions to keep your books accurate.
Dunning Notices
Automatically detect overdue invoices and generate payment reminders in up to three escalation levels. The system tracks days overdue, calculates late interest and dunning fees, and generates professional PDF reminders. Send by email or mark for postal delivery.
Projects
Projects are optional organizational containers that group multiple work orders for large construction sites. Track overall budget, hours, revenue, costs, and margin across all orders in a project. Ideal for multi-phase builds like residential complexes or commercial renovations.
Orders
Work orders (Aufträge) are the core operational unit — each represents a specific job on a construction site. Created from accepted quotes or standalone, they track status, billing type (hourly or flat rate), photos, documents, costs, and notes. Voice input via KOJI allows hands-free note-taking on site.
Time Tracking
Track working hours per employee per work order. Record start time, end time, and break duration for each day. For hourly orders, daily earnings are calculated automatically from the hourly rate. Print time summaries for clients as proof of work performed.
Mileage Log
Maintain a structured vehicle logbook (Fahrtenbuch) for company vehicles in Germany. Record every trip with start and end odometer readings, route, and purpose. The entries prepare the business/private usage split for review when vehicle costs are assessed.
OCR / Receipts
Scan receipts using your phone camera or upload files, and let the assistant extract the key data — amount, date, vendor, category, and VAT. The system creates an expense entry after confirmation. Verify and correct any uncertain fields before approving.
Planning
Central planning with three views: Kanban board, Gantt chart and resource timetable.
Employees
Manage your construction workers and office staff. Handle the legally required Sofortmeldung (instant registration per §28a SGB IV — mandatory for construction workers BEFORE they start working). Track personal data, social security numbers, tax IDs, working hours, and payroll.
Subcontractors
Manage your construction subcontractors with document, certificate, and tax checkpoint tracking. The system supports deadline monitoring for tax exemption certificates (§48b EStG) and can prepare a 15% construction withholding tax (Bauabzugsteuer) calculation when no exemption is on file. Ratings and order history help you choose reliable partners.
Tax Management
Central hub for all tax-related management in your construction business. Handle VAT returns (USt-Voranmeldung), tax prepayments, vehicle depreciation schedules, loan interest tracking, and tax exemption certificates (Freistellungsbescheinigung) required for §13b reverse charge.
Income Statement
Automatically generate the EÜR (Einnahmenüberschussrechnung — simplified profit and loss statement for small businesses). Income from invoices and expenses are aggregated into structured categories for review and filing. Export quarterly DATEV files for your accountant.
Cash Flow
Forecast your cash flow based on outstanding invoices, upcoming expenses, and planned payments. View the data as a chronological list or calendar to spot potential liquidity gaps before they happen — critical for construction businesses with large material pre-payments.
Liquidity Forecast
Look 3 to 12 months ahead and spot liquidity problems before they happen. The forecast calculates expected income from open invoices, upcoming tax prepayments, and loan installments — and automatically warns you when your balance is about to go negative.
Financial Guide
The Financial Guide walks through 21 optimization rules for construction trades in Germany. After a short diagnosis, BauFin shows which rules may apply, the estimated potential, and the price of the full report.
Controlling
Financial analysis: monthly development, customer profitability and order comparison (planned vs. actual).
Data Export Pro
Automatic daily export of all business data as ZIP. Email with download link, encrypted storage in the EU.
Archive
Document archive with GoBD-oriented functions and quarterly folder structure (Q1–Q4). Store all business documents — invoices, receipts, contracts, tax assessments, insurance policies, and correspondence. Full-text search across OCR-processed documents, with legally required retention periods.
Accountant Access
A dedicated read-only portal for your external accountant (Steuerberater). Provide a bearer token so your accountant can access invoices, expenses, the EÜR, bank statements, trip logs, and the document archive — without being able to modify any data.
Settings
Configure all company-wide settings for your construction business. Manage company master data, tax numbers, bank accounts, invoice branding (logo, colors, prefix, payment terms), notification preferences, and accountant access — everything in one place.
BauFin uses ntfy — an open notification system that does not require a phone number or Meta account. Instead of WhatsApp groups, you get a separate alert channel for invoices, payments and deadlines. Install the ntfy app, scan the QR code and choose which notifications you want to receive.
Why not WhatsApp? Learn more →OWL — Someone has to watch your payment deadlines!
OWL is a bonus module for managing recurring monthly costs — rent, leasing, insurance, phone, internet etc. A calendar sheet with 31 days shows at a glance when each payment is due. Automatic ntfy reminders help you keep deadlines in view. Why OWL? …because a late instalment hurts more than an alarm clock.
