BuchhaltGenie: The Dashboard That Understands Austria's Three Small-Business Thresholds

The pain

A sole trader has a good year. A few large jobs more than usual, and suddenly she is sitting across from her tax advisor, who explains: you crossed a threshold -- three months ago, in fact. Retroactively liable for VAT, back-payment included. The tricky part isn't the threshold itself. It's that she never noticed, because her software didn't know it existed.

This exact moment -- the nasty surprise at the tax advisor's office -- is the reason BuchhaltGenie exists.

Why "small business" in Austria isn't a single number

In Austria, "small business" isn't one threshold but three. And they have nothing to do with each other:

• Value-added tax (UStG): Up to €55,000 gross annual turnover, you may invoice without VAT (small-business rule, § 6 UStG). Above that you become liable for VAT -- retroactively, from the moment you crossed it. A one-time overshoot of up to 10 % -- that is, up to €60,500 -- is still tolerated; only beyond that does liability kick in immediately.
• Social insurance (GSVG): At an annual profit of €6,613.20, full mandatory insurance with the SVS kicks in. A completely different number, a different law, a different authority.
• Income tax (EStG): The base lump-sum scheme and the profit limits follow their own rules again, in the Income Tax Act.

Three dimensions, three thresholds, three points in time. Most accounting tools know exactly one of them -- usually the turnover limit, because it's the best-known. Cross either of the other two, and you only find out when it's already too late.

In Austria there isn't one small-business threshold but three -- and most tools know only one. BuchhaltGenie shows all three as a traffic light, before you cross them.

BuchhaltGenie models all three separately and puts them into the dashboard as a traffic-light cockpit: green means comfortable headroom, amber means "keep an eye on it", red means "you're over, or about to be". Per threshold, individually. So you can see at a glance which of the three dimensions needs attention -- weeks before the tax-advisor appointment, not after.

Evidence diagram

BuchhaltGenie Threshold / Data Model Map

The three small-business thresholds and the compliance model as separate layers.

Small-business thresholds

UStG

modelled separately

GSVG

modelled separately

EStG

modelled separately

12 laws/regulations

12

built into the data model

Open beta

01.06.2026

Hosting

EU Frankfurt

Legal texts from findok and RIS

Compliance is built in, not bolted on

The second pillar is legal certainty -- and it doesn't live in a validation plugin, it lives directly in the data model. Twelve Austrian laws and regulations are built into the structure, not bolted on afterwards: among them UStG § 11 (mandatory invoice fields), the tax rates 20/13/10/0 %, BAO § 132 (7-year retention requirement), the UGB, the FinanzOnline export, the RKSV, and the GDPR.

What that means in practice: an invoice cannot leave the system in the first place if it's missing a UStG § 11 mandatory field. No sequential invoice number, no correct tax-rate breakdown, no service date -- then there's no PDF, no dispatch. The rule isn't a notice you can dismiss. It's a wall. That makes the tool considerably safer for someone who doesn't carry the paragraphs in their head than a checklist you can forget to run.

The dashboard

The cockpit sums up what an entrepreneur wants to know in the morning, without clicking through lists:

• The three traffic lights for UStG, GSVG and EStG, each with the current distance to its threshold.
• Liquidity at a glance -- what's outstanding, what's overdue, what's coming in.
• Deadlines for advance returns, declarations and retention, before they become a problem.
• KPIs on turnover, profit and open items over time.

The goal isn't a wall of numbers but an answer to the question: where do I stand right now, and what do I need to deal with next?

Sophie: answers based on current legal text

Sophie is the embedded assistant. She works with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) over daily-synced legal texts from findok and RIS -- the official Austrian sources. Ask "Which tax rate applies to my service?" or "What does UStG § 11 require on the invoice?", and you get an answer grounded in the currently applicable legal text, not in the model's training data.

The honest caveat: Sophie delivers answers based on the current legal texts. That does not mean every calculated value in the system automatically updates to the latest figures -- legislative changes affecting amounts are deliberately reviewed and carried over, not adopted blindly. Sophie is a preview of what grows next, not an oracle.

Status and result

BuchhaltGenie is live, open beta since 01.06.2026 at buchhaltgenie.at. Hosted in the EU (Frankfurt), GDPR-compliant including the data-subject rights under Art. 15 (access), Art. 17 (erasure) and Art. 21 (objection). Security and accessibility are self-audited.

The platform was built as a solo project -- from architecture through the data model to the compliance implementation.

Lessons

The real complexity wasn't the tech, it was the domain knowledge. Keeping the three small-business thresholds cleanly apart and warning at the right moment was more research than code. Cut corners here, and you build a tool that, like all the others, only knows one threshold.

Putting compliance into the data model costs upfront and pays at the back. An invoice the system won't release without its mandatory fields is more work to build than a frontend warning. In exchange, no one can bypass it -- not even by accident.

RAG over legal text is a tool, not a promise. Up-to-date sources are good, but amounts and calculation logic deserve review, not automatic pass-through. Being honest about where automation stops is part of the product.