Three lists, and not one of them is a certificate

While you are choosing a package, something official-sounding will be waved at you: an authority, a scheme, a badge. It helps to know what those references can mean, because in the countries this network covers, no tax administration certifies accounting software. Three of the four publish something that is easily mistaken for approval. Here is what each of them actually publishes, in its own words.

Germany: 623 products, on the manufacturers' own word

ELSTER, the German tax administration's online office, publishes a list of software products that work with it. One sentence on that page says where the information comes from:

"Die Hersteller der folgenden 623 Softwareprodukte haben uns gegenüber angegeben, dass sie mit ihrer Software ELSTER unterstützen."

The manufacturers of the following 623 software products have told us that their software supports ELSTER.

"Haben uns gegenüber angegeben" — they told us. It is a self-declaration, collected and published, and the page claims nothing beyond it: no test, no assessment, no ranking. It is also a statement about a filing channel, not about bookkeeping quality.

Belgium: a list that spells out what it is not

Belgium publishes a list of compliant software applications, and its disclaimer is the most useful paragraph written on this subject anywhere:

"Listing software on this list does not imply a substantive evaluation, qualitative assessment or certification by the FPS Finance. The FPS Finance does not endorse any product or software provider. The accuracy of the data is the responsibility of the company that registered the software. This list is also not comprehensive. Only applications that have registered are included."

Two things follow from that. Software gets on the list by asking to be on it — "Is your software already connected to the Peppol network but not yet on the list? Please review the procedure and register through the sign-up form to be added to this list" — so absence from the list says nothing about a product. And the list is about electronic invoicing, sending and receiving structured invoices ahead of the obligation that starts on 1 January 2026, rather than about keeping books.

Belgium does certify something here, which is where much of the confusion comes from: a business that wants to connect to the invoicing network itself is pointed to "a certified service provider". That certificate covers the party moving the invoice, not the software you keep your accounts in.

The Netherlands: the channel is compulsory, the software is not certified

Dutch filings travel through SBR. Logius, the government service behind it, defines it as "de nationale standaard voor de digitale uitwisseling van alle bedrijfsmatige rapportages, zoals jaarrekeningen, vastgoedtaxaties en belastingaangiften" — the national standard for exchanging business reports, from annual accounts to tax returns. And it is not optional: "SBR is de exclusieve aanlevermethode voor een aantal verplichte rapportages aan de Belastingdienst, KVK en de banken."

So the route is mandatory while the software on it is neither licensed nor approved. What the Dutch tax administration runs for software developers is a support service: specifications per message flow, a developer number, test facilities, and a validation service that checks a message's encoding and character set, whether it is well-formed, its syntax, its XBRL and its internal consistency. Those are checks on a file you submit, not a verdict on the product that produced it.

There used to be one place to look up which packages supported SBR, sbrsoftwarecheck.nl. On 8 September 2026 we queried that domain ourselves: it has no DNS record at all any more, so the answer that site used to give is simply gone.

Austria: specifications, no list

Austria's finance ministry publishes information for software manufacturers about "Datenstromübermittlung an die Finanzverwaltung" — the requirements and structures ("Vorgaben und Strukturen") for transmitting each type of declaration. That is documentation for building an interface, published per declaration rather than per product. We looked for an Austrian list of accounting products, approved or otherwise, and found none.

What this leaves you with

This last part is our own reasoning rather than anything an authority says.

If you are handed a badge, ask which of the four things above it is. A product may genuinely support a country's filing channel — that is worth knowing, and it is exactly what we record per package. What no badge can tell you is whether the bookkeeping underneath is right for you, because nobody is checking that: not in Germany, where the vendors describe themselves; not in Belgium, where the register says in so many words that it evaluates nothing; not in the Netherlands, where the one lookup that existed has disappeared; and not in Austria, where only the interface is documented.

The same standard applies to us. We publish no seal and award no marks. Every price and every capability in the comparison carries the vendor page it was read from and the date we read it, and where a vendor's own page does not answer a question unambiguously, we record nothing rather than guess. How that works is set out in our methodology.

Official sources

Read on 8 September 2026. Check the source yourself before you decide anything: pages and lists change.