Pennylane

The Skeptic

The captured pages show AI booking suggestions with account assignment, journal entries generated automatically from invoice data, bank transaction capture, and categorisation rules for recurring suppliers — a real ledger underneath, in the French comptabilité tradition. But we found no public information on a German chart of accounts (SKR03/SKR04), free manual postings, opening balances, cost centres, or a period close with locking, and the German bookkeeping help collection holds just two articles. 1 3 4 7

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The Skeptic

This is the page after page I have learned to distrust, and here even the marketing word is absent: no GoBD claim, no Verfahrensdokumentation, no retention statement, no described audit trail anywhere in the captures — only ISO/IEC 27001, which secures data but proves nothing fiscally. The documented exports are Excel and CSV lists, not an auditor's data export, and the help pages describe deleting receipts by status. Scored at the anchor for no GoBD claim, no retention statement, no documentation. 1 8 9 10

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The Skeptic

What is evidenced is e-invoicing: ZUGFeRD generated automatically with format and mandatory-field checks, VAT rate recognised on receipts, and French e-invoicing and e-reporting compliance as an agréée platform. We found no public information on UStVA, ELSTER submission, EÜR or a balance sheet, OSS, or reverse charge — the captured model hands filings to the Steuerberater rather than producing them. 1 3 7

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The Skeptic

Capture is genuinely broad — camera with auto-crop, email forwarding, Google Drive, Dropbox, merchant connectors — with OCR filling amount, VAT and supplier in seconds, learning over time, duplicate detection, journal entries generated once data is complete, and payments automatically matched to open invoices; e-invoices are created, sent, received and archived in ZUGFeRD. But we found no public information on automatic bank feeds for German banks or on replacement scanning (ersetzendes Scannen) that would let paper be destroyed, which is what separates good capture from a closed evidence chain. 3 7 8

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The Skeptic

I read every captured page for the word DATEV and it never appears: the only documented exports are XLSX and CSV lists of transactions, invoices, customers and products, so a German Kanzlei on DATEV has no bridge at all. What the vendor does show is the other half of the criterion done properly — the adviser works in the data in real time, receipts are sent automatically on import, document requests arrive with due dates and automatic emails, and comments run both ways — which is worth more than a bare export but cannot replace the format every German adviser asks for. 3 6 9

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The Skeptic

Client data and the application are stated to be hosted in the EU, contracting runs through Pennylane SAS in Paris with Pennylane GmbH in Munich and a Spanish entity forming, and three financial partners (SWAN, DEFACTO, Adyen) are named — a European chain, with ISO/IEC 27001 indicated. But we found no public information on a complete subprocessor list, the captured OCR article says a small share of invoices goes through external APIs whose location is unstated, and nothing describes an export that satisfies statutory retention after leaving; the independently sourced attributes themselves came back unknown. 1 2 7

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The Skeptic

The numbers I compute invoices from simply are not there: no public tier prices, no booking or document limits, no extra-user or bank-account price, no VAT treatment or minimum term — only that e-invoicing is included in all plans, the OCR is free, a reports export requires an Essential or Premium plan, and the sales route is a demo. A business cannot derive its annual invoice from these pages, and since there is no DATEV export, the question of which tier it appears in never even arises. 1 3 7 9

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