Tax, accounting, and operational guides for Germany

When does a country do its bookkeeping? For employees the answer is simple: during working hours, because there is an accounting department for it. The self-employed have none. We measured when they actually get this work done.

The basis: about 5,000 active bookkeeping hours of nearly 1,000 self-employed people and small businesses in Germany, hours in which someone wrote an invoice, uploaded a receipt, or recorded a transaction.

The result: every second of these hours falls outside Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm. More bookkeeping happens at 9pm than at 9am, Sunday beats Saturday by one and a half times, and invoicing has a rhythm of its own: the turn of the month.