Updated: May 2026
mika is the AI alternative to a tax firm. mika handles the complete bookkeeping of your GmbH, UG or AG (German limited companies and stock corporations) including the Jahresabschluss (the annual financial statement), the balance sheet and the corporate income tax, trade tax and annual VAT returns.
Qonto, Finom and Holvi are very good business bank accounts with built-in receipt capture and transaction categorisation. They are data suppliers, not the end point. A GmbH, UG or AG always needs mika or a Steuerberater (a licensed German tax advisor) on top, whatever its size or complexity. mika is like software and a tax firm in one.
mika connects to every common business bank account over the open banking interface. You keep your bank, mika takes over the bookkeeping.
Qonto, Finom and Holvi are mature, established business bank accounts. Quick account opening, a modern app, several IBANs, team cards, a clear view of transactions, decent receipt recognition by photo or email, automatic VAT categorisation. Finom itself describes the scope honestly: "capturing, collecting and sorting receipts in a structured way, documenting all financial transactions". That is a preliminary stage, a neatly prepared data export.
A GmbH, UG or AG is required to prepare accounts under section 264 HGB (the German Commercial Code): double entry bookkeeping, a balance sheet, a profit and loss account, a corporate income tax return, a trade tax return, an annual VAT return and publication in the Bundesanzeiger (the German federal gazette). Of all that, a business bank account delivers: none of it. That is not an accusation, it is architecture. Banks are banks. Even a one person UG with three transactions a month needs every one of those items once a year. A bank on its own is never a legal solution for a limited company that has to prepare accounts, whatever its size, whatever its complexity.
mika is like software and a tax firm in one. With mika's AI you get the receipt checks, the account assignment, the ongoing bookkeeping, the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung (the monthly VAT return), the Jahresabschluss, the balance sheet, the profit and loss account and the corporate income tax, trade tax and annual VAT returns. Trained bookkeepers (Steuerfachangestellte and Bilanzbuchhalter, the German bookkeeping qualifications) do the quality control. You file straight from mika, without your own ELSTER certificate. For the routine you do not need a Steuerberater on top. If you want to keep an existing relationship with a tax firm, you keep it and use mika for the ongoing bookkeeping. For complex tax questions mika matches you with a partner from its network when you need one.
The usual feature table compares what tools can do. This table compares what you, as the managing director of a GmbH, want to have finished at the end.
As business bank accounts, Qonto, Finom and Holvi all do a very solid job. Each of the three covers a slightly different part of the market.
Qonto is the French neobank with its German base in Berlin, founded in 2017, and by its own account serving more than 600,000 small and medium sized business customers across Europe in 2026. Packages start at €9 a month (Basic) and run through Smart (€19), Premium, Essential and Business up to Enterprise. For a GmbH the entry point is usually Smart or Premium.
What makes Qonto strong:
mika connects to Qonto over open banking. Transactions flow into mika automatically, receipts are matched, accounts are assigned and bookkeepers quality check the result.
Finom is a Dutch founded neobank, active in Germany and positioned strongly in the one person UG and freelancer segment. The Solo account model is free for sole traders and freelancers, and paid plans start at around €8.99 a month.
What makes Finom strong:
mika connects to Finom over open banking.
Holvi is a Finnish neobank and remains fully active in Germany. As of May 2026 all its plans are operational (gruendung.de): Flex (€0), Lite (€9, or €4.50 on an annual contract), Pro (€15 or €9), Business (€69 or €59). Holvi is aimed particularly at freelancers and sole traders, and GmbHs and UGs can use the account in their founding and early phase as well.
What makes Holvi strong:
mika connects to Holvi over open banking. The Lexware Office integration is preparatory work, and the Jahresabschluss is not possible in Lexware Office.
Qonto, Finom and Holvi capture receipts solidly: a photo in the app, an email inbox, drag and drop, plus interfaces to third party tools. Text recognition extracts amounts, dates and suppliers and puts them in a category. What is not checked: whether the receipt is formally correct. A wrong or missing tax number, a mandatory detail missing under section 14 UStG (the German VAT Act), a wrong VAT rate: none of that surfaces until your Steuerberater takes a look, or until the Finanzamt (the German tax office) asks.
At mika the AI checks every receipt for the VAT rate, the recipient, the address and the mandatory details under section 14 UStG. Where there is doubt, the bookkeepers take a look. That saves corrections later on and it saves real money. A missing tax number or a wrong VAT rate on a supplier invoice costs you the 19 percent input VAT refund on the invoice amount. On €500 of goods purchased that is €95, simply gone.
This is where the fog of terminology makes life hard for a lot of managing directors. A bank writes "VAT detection" and "categorisation" on its website. That sounds like bookkeeping. It is only the preliminary stage.
Categorisation means: the bank puts "delivery from Amazon" into the category "office supplies". Handy for an overview, irrelevant for the tax paperwork.
Account assignment in the strict sense means: every booking gets a journal entry on an account in SKR03 or SKR04 (the standard German charts of accounts), with the correct debit, credit, VAT code and link to the receipt. That is the real craft of bookkeeping, and no bank does it.
So at Qonto, Finom or Holvi you do not do the account assignment at all. You export the data, and at the end of the year your tax firm takes over the bookkeeping in the strict sense. If you do assign the accounts yourself, with additional software such as Lexware Office for example, you confirm booking suggestions per receipt. If you do not understand the bookkeeping logic, you assign accounts wrongly, and your tax firm rebooks everything at the end of the year. That costs considerably more than the software licence, often several times as much. It is one of the main cost drivers in small GmbHs: many people think they are saving money by booking themselves. In reality the tax firm does most of it a second time and puts it on the invoice.
With mika's AI the account assignment happens automatically at line item level, even on complex invoices with different VAT rates, a catering invoice with 7 percent on the food and 19 percent on the service for example. Trained bookkeepers do the quality control. You do not need any prior bookkeeping knowledge.
Something many people underestimate: since April 2026 mika has run its own bookkeeping ledger and allows custom HGB accounts on top of SKR03 and SKR04. In practice that means: if your business does not fit the standard charts of accounts, say a holding with three subsidiaries, a SaaS business with staggered revenue recognition or a product mix with one-off revenue, you can set up your own accounts and structures in mika that match your reality. In bank bookkeeping this logic does not exist at all, because no account assignment in the strict sense takes place.
This is the decisive question that the DUO workflow often obscures. DATEV Unternehmen Online is a delivery portal. It transmits nothing to the Finanzamt. The Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung, the payroll tax return and every annual tax return are filed by your firm over DATEV's ELSTER interface, not by you, and not by DUO.
With mika the AI calculates the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung from the bookings, the bookkeepers check it and you approve it. You can file straight from mika and you do not need your own ELSTER certificate for it.
This is where the biggest and most expensive difference sits. Qonto, Finom and Holvi do not prepare a Jahresabschluss and cannot, because bank bookkeeping ends at the data export. And for a GmbH, UG or AG that is exactly what is mandatory: a balance sheet under HGB, a profit and loss account, notes, corporate income tax, trade tax, the annual VAT return and publication in the Bundesanzeiger.
With mika you get the complete Jahresabschluss in the "Bookkeeping and financial statements" plan. The balance sheet, the profit and loss account and the notes under HGB are prepared from the ongoing bookkeeping, you approve them as the managing director and you file them. You do not need your own ELSTER certificate for it. The Bundesanzeiger XML for publication is included. For the eBilanz (the electronic balance sheet filing) mika works together with eBilanzPlus.
mika, Qonto, Finom and Holvi all create outgoing invoices in the XRechnung and ZUGFeRD e-invoicing formats.
At mika every invoice also carries a QR code for instant payment from a banking app. In our experience customers pay faster, because they do not have to type out an IBAN and a payment reference first. You settle open invoices in a payment run straight from mika, without switching to online banking.
The bank solution has the advantage that payments and invoicing sit in the same tool.
If you have freelancers submitting receipts every month, or employees paying with their own card, you need a clear workflow. mika has a 5-step process for it: enter the expense, validate the receipts, confirm, pay, done. External people submit through a public one-time link, without a mika login. Expenses without a receipt (tips, parking fees) you record with a description. Everything stays in the app. mika's AI assigns the expense to the right account automatically and the reimbursement is recorded as a payment. No double entry, no CSV export.
Qonto, Finom and Holvi solve travel expenses with team cards and receipt capture on the card transaction. That works for the expense itself, but it does not cover the bookkeeping side (the account assignment, allocating it to the right employee, the reimbursement workflow). Anyone with expenses that were not put on a card (tips, parking fees, personal outlay) needs a separate solution.
mika is the first German bookkeeping solution with an MCP server (Model Context Protocol) officially operated by the vendor, for Claude, ChatGPT and other LLM clients. Since March 2026, read-only, for every customer. You connect your AI tools straight to your mika data and ask bookkeeping questions with your real numbers as context. You ask Claude or ChatGPT: "how much cash will I have next month after the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung?" or "which single supplier am I paying the most?" The answer comes out of your data, not off the internet.
Since April 2026 Qonto has had two AI agents of its own, "The Operator" and "The Analyst" (it-finanzmagazin.de), which automate financial administration tasks. Finom and Holvi currently have no comparable AI agent. An MCP server for external AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT is not part of the product at any of the three banks.
On top of that there is the mika Agent in the app. It has access to your own data and answers concrete questions like "why does this invoice have a to-do?", "show me all AWS invoices from Q3" or "what do I owe the Finanzamt this month?". The mika Agent also turns letters from the authorities into clear instructions. A letter from the Finanzamt saying "section 152 AO late filing penalty" becomes: "you filed the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung late, the Finanzamt wants €50, and here is the deadline for appealing."
If you are in the middle of founding a GmbH or UG, the first few weeks are administrative routine: the Fragebogen zur steuerlichen Erfassung (the tax registration questionnaire), applying for a tax number, preparing an opening balance sheet.
mika solves the tax registration simply. You upload your incorporation documents, the wizard asks you a few questions, and after 10 to 15 minutes you can file. If you become a mika customer it is free. If not, it costs €49 one-off. Qonto, Finom and Holvi do not help with the formalities of founding a company
Three special cases that come up often in mika's audience: payroll for a growing GmbH, ecommerce with Stripe volume, and strategic tax questions where the advice goes beyond the routine.
With a bank that offers pre-accounting you see the account fee. What you do not see: the Steuerberater invoice that comes on top every year, because the account assignment, the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung, the Jahresabschluss, the balance sheet, corporate income tax and trade tax all have to be done externally. At mika the fixed price is the total price, and the only thing the bank adds is the account fee.
Under the StBVV, the German fee schedule that sets what a Steuerberater may charge, the mid-range fee for a GmbH works out at:
A GmbH with a balance sheet total of €2.5 million and 10 employees pays €24,298/year to its Steuerberater at the StBVV mid-range fee.
mika scales with bank transactions per month, not with revenue and not with complexity. Six clear bands between €49 and €549 per month, anything above that as an individual quote.
Standard plan (agencies, consultancies, B2B and B2C SaaS, ecommerce with Pathway, real estate either purely commercial or purely private):
Three typical profiles show what this means in practice for a GmbH. The revenue and headcount figures are rough indications for service GmbHs (agencies, consultancies, SaaS).
mika prices: from the standard plan bands. Bank costs: Qonto Smart as the reference, €19/month = €228/year. Steuerberater costs: from the StBVV mid-range fee for each size class.
For a typical GmbH that means a saving of roughly €8,000 to €20,000 per year against a bank plus a Steuerberater. Money that is better off in the business than with an adviser. The bank stays the same in both scenarios.
The short answer: never, if you run a GmbH, UG or AG. Specifically:
For mika's typical audience, meaning a GmbH or UG with 3 to 30 employees, no internal finance team and no close tie to a Steuerberater, the bank on its own is not an option. Bank plus mika is the obvious combination.
For a GmbH, UG or AG, mika is the right choice if you want bookkeeping off your plate as a task. mika is like software and a tax firm in one. With mika the bookkeeping takes care of itself, including the Jahresabschluss, the balance sheet and the tax returns. Trained bookkeepers quality check the ongoing books. The "Bookkeeping and financial statements" plan starts at €99 a month.
Qonto, Finom and Holvi are very good business bank accounts, but they are data suppliers, not the end point.
A GmbH or UG that has to prepare accounts always needs mika or a tax firm on top. Because mika connects to every common business bank account over open banking, you do not have to change bank. If you do not want the bank plus Steuerberater division of labour, mika is the obvious choice.
As of May 2026.
mika has made my life so much easier and more efficient!
No. You do not need your own ELSTER certificate. You never have to log into ELSTER.
No, and it is not meant to. mika is a bookkeeping solution, not a business bank account. You still need a bank for your IBAN, your cards and your payments. mika connects to every common business bank account over open banking, so Qonto, Finom, Holvi and other banks.
No. Qonto does very good receipt capture and VAT categorisation as a data supplier. For a GmbH's accounting obligations (double entry bookkeeping, filing the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung with ELSTER, the Jahresabschluss, corporate income tax, trade tax) Qonto is not enough. You need either a tax firm on top or a bookkeeping solution like mika.
No, likewise not. Even a one person UG with three transactions a month has to prepare accounts: double entry bookkeeping, a balance sheet, a profit and loss account, corporate income tax and trade tax returns and publication in the Bundesanzeiger. Finom and Holvi supply the data, and the actual bookkeeping is done either by mika or by your tax firm. There is no legal bank-only setup for a limited company that has to prepare accounts.
Yes. As of May 2026 Holvi remains fully active in Germany, with its own fee structure and current account models (Flex, Lite, Pro, Business). The company is registered in the German commercial register and appears in current reviews from May 2026.
mika connects to your business bank account over the open banking interface. Transactions are pulled into mika automatically, matched with the receipts you upload, assigned to accounts in SKR03 or SKR04 and quality checked by trained bookkeepers. The Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung and the Jahresabschluss are prepared in mika and you file them straight from mika, without your own ELSTER certificate.
Yes. A holding costs €600 per year at mika as a standalone financial statement, or €200 per year as an add-on if the operating GmbH or UG runs on mika as well. Bookings for shareholdings and holding specific tax matters are covered. A bank does not cover holding structures.
Yes. mika exports your bookkeeping in the DATEV EXTF format at any time. You can hand the data to your Steuerberater without mika locking you in.
For the routine (the ongoing bookkeeping, the Umsatzsteuervoranmeldung, the Jahresabschluss, the balance sheet, corporate income tax, trade tax, the annual VAT return) mika is enough. If you need strategic tax advice, for complex shareholder structures or cross-border matters for example, mika will match you with a partner Steuerberater. A common setup: mika for the routine, your own Steuerberater for the strategy. The DATEV EXTF export is available at any time.
With mika the Jahresabschluss is included in the "Bookkeeping and financial statements" plan. The pricing scales with transactions per month: €99 at up to 25 transactions, €199 at up to 50, €549 at up to 150. So a small GmbH with up to 25 transactions per month pays around €1,188 per year for the complete bookkeeping plus the Jahresabschluss plus all three big tax returns. A typical agency with 50 transactions per month pays €2,388/year. For comparison: under the StBVV, the German fee schedule for Steuerberater, a GmbH with a balance sheet total of €2.5 million and 10 employees pays a mid-range €24,298/year to its Steuerberater, and over €40,000 at the top end.
By July after the end of the financial year. At classic firms it often takes until October or longer, because the financial statement is scheduled as a separate job. At mika it is part of the package and takes shape continuously out of the data that has already been checked.
Yes. Since March 2026 mika has had a native, official MCP server (read-only) for every customer. You connect Claude, ChatGPT or another MCP-compatible tool straight to your mika data and ask bookkeeping questions with your real numbers as context.
GmbHs, UGs and AGs in agencies (IT, design, marketing, software), recruiting, SaaS, professional services, ecommerce (with the Pathway integration), property management, holding companies and bricks-and-mortar retail with a digital till. Not supported are freelancers, a GbR (a German civil law partnership), sole traders, trading firms, crypto companies and gambling.
All data on German servers, GDPR compliant, AWS infrastructure in Frankfurt. mika is built along the GoBD principles for proper bookkeeping in electronic form. Authentication with two-factor (a TOTP authenticator app).