How it works today
A white envelope arrives from the Finanzamt. Four pages of dense Beamten-Deutsch: the register of German civil-service writing where one sentence can run for eighty words and still leave you unsure whether you owe money or are owed money. A Mahnung is a payment demand. A Widerspruchsfrist is the window for an objection. Miss it by three days and the number on page three may no longer be negotiable.
You have been in Berlin for two years. Your B1 German is fine for ordering lunch. It is not fine for this. You put the envelope on the kitchen table. A week later you put the next one on top of it. The stack grows.
How it works
Photograph the letter with your phone. The product does not simply translate it. Translation would give you long sentences in another language you still might not read. Instead it extracts four fields and nothing else:
- Type: Mahnung (second reminder).
- Amount: 45.30 EUR.
- Deadline: next Tuesday, 29 April.
- Action: pay the IBAN at the bottom of page 2, or the Finanzamt can escalate to enforcement.
A traffic light at the top keeps the answer plain: red means act now, yellow means a deadline is coming, green means it is informational only.
The moment it becomes clear
Seven seconds with the envelope still half-open, and you know whether to pay, object, or file the letter away. The stack on the kitchen table stops growing.