Geierlein
a free Elster client, i.e. an application that allows you to send VAT declarations to Germany's fiscal authorities.
Geierlein is …
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easy to understand
… it features a shortened version of the VAT declaration form, coping with typical needs.
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fast & simple
… it works out of the box, just unpack the ZIP archive and launch the application. No need to configure & make.
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free & open
… it's free software. You don't have to rely on a black box doing the encryption of your private data. You get the source, just have a look into it.
Geierlein does not allow to send income tax returns
Unfortunately it's still not possible to send returns that are due annually since the fiscal authorities don't allow to do that off the ERiC library (which is proprietary however). It's currently not clear whether one day it will be possible at all.
… a desktop application in disguise …
To mimic the look & feel of a desktop application it's based on Mozilla XUL, the engine used by the Firefox browser. This is, any system that's capable of running Firefox also is able to run Geierlein, …hence it should work on at least GNU/Linux, Windows & MacOS.
Here's a screenshot of the XUL-based application:
Other interfaces
Since Geierlein's core is written in pure HTML5 & JavaScript, it's not only cross plattform, but it's also easy to target different interfaces. The primary one is the XUL application mentioned above. If you're a console monk, you can use Geierlein on the command line (with Node.js). In case you've got no XUL runner (i.e. Firefox) installed, you may want to serve Geierlein using a locally installed web server (like Nginx).
Who's behind Geierlein?
Geierlein is an essential part of Taxbird, a private project of me, Stefan Siegl. I started the project back in 2004, mainly as I was a tax accountant assistant ("Steuerfachangestellter") and therefore got a natural interest in the topic. Since I'm very much engaged with computers in general, and software development in particular, somewhen the question arose how the ELSTER-project works in detail and I regretted that there was no open source client for it…
Until today I've neither been a freelancer nor an entrepreneur, and therefore never have been obliged to file VAT declarations. Hence I never was actually able to use Geierlein in production. In case you consider the project useful, I'd very much appreciate a little donation to contribute to the development costs.