CoPilot Tax
CoPilot Tax is the generative AI assistant built into Haufe Steuer Office. German tax practitioners ask questions in plain language and receive drafted answers sourced exclusively from the publisher's own vetted tax library, with every citation linked.
What is CoPilot Tax?
CoPilot Tax is a generative AI assistant embedded in Haufe Steuer Office, the professional tax database published by Haufe-Lexware in Freiburg, Germany. It is not sold separately: it ships inside every edition of that database, at no extra cost and with no practical cap on the number of questions, and it cannot be used without a subscription. The publisher describes the name as a nod to Microsoft's Copilot. The processing chain is published openly. A user types a question or a research instruction; the assistant interprets the intent and identifies the relevant areas of tax law; it retrieves the matching passages from the edition the customer has actually subscribed to; a large language model composes an answer from those passages; and the sources used are listed and hyperlinked at the end, so the original document is one click away. The user can then ask follow-up questions, narrow the focus or request a different output format, which turns a single lookup into an iterative exchange. What sets it apart from a general chatbot is the closed corpus. Haufe states that no content from the open web is drawn in: the knowledge base is exclusively the editorially maintained material of Haufe Steuer Office. The assistant is also built to recognise its own boundaries — when it finds no matching source it says so, and it will not answer questions outside tax law. The technology and the feature set are identical across all editions; only the breadth and depth of the answers change, because the corpus behind them differs. Access is frictionless for an existing subscriber: a portlet on the Haufe Steuer Office home page opens the assistant with no separate registration and no second login, and the Haufe Suite carries a direct link. Chats are saved automatically and can be renamed or filed into folders. The same assistant runs in a mobile browser and can be pinned to a phone's home screen, with no native app involved. Eight sibling assistants — for HR, law, real estate, occupational safety, finance and more — exist as separate products.
What it does
- Answer a German tax question in plain language, drawing only on the subscribed Haufe Steuer Office edition
- Show and link the sources behind every answer so they can be opened in one click
- Continue the enquiry as a dialogue, refining through follow-up questions it also suggests itself
- Return the answer in the format asked for: a client email, a template or a step-by-step guide
- Store up to ten recurring prompts as reusable templates
- Keep, rename and file conversations in folders for later reuse
- Run on a phone through the browser, including by dictation, with no app to install
When to use CoPilot Tax / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if CoPilot Tax is the right fit.
When to use CoPilot Tax
- German tax advisers (Steuerberater) who already subscribe to Haufe Steuer Office and want to replace keyword searching with a conversation
- Tax clerks and specialists (Steuerfachangestellte, Steuerfachwirte) handling everyday research on VAT, income tax and loss carry-forwards
- In-house tax and accounting teams dealing with special cases such as crypto gains, BEPS Pillar Two or cross-border services
- Practice owners preparing client communication, who need a plain-language email or briefing drafted from a legal source
- Enterprises wanting to pipe Haufe's vetted tax knowledge into their own chatbot or workflow through the documented Copilot API
When not to use CoPilot Tax
- Anyone without a Haufe Steuer Office subscription: the assistant cannot be bought or used on its own
- Practitioners working outside German tax law, since the knowledge base is the German-language Haufe corpus
- Non German-speaking users, as the interface, the questions and the answers are all in German
- Anyone expecting binding advice: the terms state plainly that the output replaces neither a tax adviser nor a lawyer
- Teams that would need to paste real client personal data into the prompt, which the terms of use forbid
How to use CoPilot Tax
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Subscribe to one of the four Haufe Steuer Office editions, or start the free four-week trial, which is activated within minutes
- Open Haufe Steuer Office and click the CoPilot Tax portlet on the home page — no extra registration, no second login
- If you work through the Haufe Suite instead, use the direct link on its home page
- Ask your question in full sentences rather than keywords, and leave nothing out that seems obvious
- Be as specific as the case allows: a vague prompt produces a vague answer
- For a complex matter, take it in stages — clarify one part, then move to the next in the same conversation
- Use the follow-up questions the assistant proposes after each answer, or write your own
- Open the cited sources to check the answer against the underlying document before you rely on it
- Ask for the output in the shape you need, such as a client email or a step-by-step note, then copy it out in one click
- On a phone, open haufe.de in the browser, sign in, open CoPilot Tax and add the page to your home screen; dictation then replaces typing
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Answers rest on a closed, editorially maintained corpus rather than the open web
- Every answer cites and links its sources, so it can be verified in seconds
- Included at no extra charge in every Haufe Steuer Office edition, with no meaningful question limit
- Customer input is excluded from model training — stated in the product page, the privacy notice and the terms
- Processing takes place in European data centres on Microsoft Azure
- Four-week free trial with no commitment, activated within minutes
- A documented public API lets larger organisations embed the same knowledge in their own systems
Cons
- Cannot be bought or used on its own: the entry ticket is a Haufe Steuer Office subscription from 989 EUR net a year
- No permanent free plan — only a four-week trial
- Scope is strictly German tax law, and the interface and answers are German-only
- Answer quality depends on the edition subscribed: two customers do not get the same depth
- The publisher itself warns that the AI can be wrong and that every answer must be checked
- The terms forbid entering personal data in the prompt, which constrains how a real case can be described
- The live shop is closed to automated access and serves no robots.txt, making independent price checking awkward
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan, and CoPilot Tax carries no price of its own: it is included at no additional cost in every edition of Haufe Steuer Office, so the entry point is the subscription to that database. The lowest price point is 989.00 EUR per year, excluding VAT, for the Basic Plus edition with a three-user licence (1,058.23 EUR including the reduced 7% German rate). A four-week free trial of any edition is offered without commitment. These amounts were read from an archived capture of the product page dated 13 April 2026, the live page being closed to automated access; pricing for the separate Haufe Copilot API is not published and is quoted on request.
- foundational tax and commercial law content
- 4 practitioner commentaries
- 2
- 000 work aids
- 6 online seminars a year
- CoPilot Tax included
- tax law
- bookkeeping and annual accounts
- 14 practitioner commentaries
- 2
- 000 work aids
- 15 online seminars a year
- CoPilot Tax included
- tax law
- bookkeeping
- payroll and practice management with training
- 20 practitioner commentaries
- 3
- 000 work aids
- VAT Navigator and vGA Navigator
- 40 online seminars a year
- everything in Gold plus the 'practice in transition' library
- 21 practitioner commentaries
- 3
- 000 work aids
- VAT Navigator
- vGA Navigator and SteuerBriefing
- 45 online seminars a year
- CoPilot Tax included
- Free trial — four weeks on the edition of your choice
- no commitment
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how CoPilot Tax handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR implementation is documented in concrete terms, not merely claimed. CoPilot Tax has a privacy notice of its own, dated February 2025, and separate terms of use dated May 2024. It names the controller, a group data protection officer reachable at dsb@haufe-lexware.com, the legal basis for each processing purpose (Article 6(1)(b) for chat history, 6(1)(f) for logs and analytics, 6(1)(a) for Mixpanel), and the individual rights under Articles 15 to 21 and 77. Contractual processing takes place solely in an EU or EEA data centre; transfers to the United States for maintenance and support are not fully excluded and are covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. A separate Article 28 data processing agreement is concluded inside the SaaS product. Named sub-processors are disclosed. The general haufe.de policy, by contrast, still carries a July 2022 date.
Who owns the data?
The privacy notice for CoPilot Tax names Haufe Service Center GmbH, Freiburg, as the controller under the GDPR, while the product's own terms of use are issued by Haufe-Lexware GmbH & Co. KG — the two documents do not name the same entity, and the discrepancy is left as published. Users keep responsibility for what they type in and for anything they do with the generated answer. The publisher commits to treating the user's information, data and documents as confidential and not to sell, publish or disclose them without written consent. A group data protection officer, Raik Mickler, is designated, and the full set of GDPR rights from Articles 15 to 21 and 77 is spelled out.
Reuse rights
Answers can be copied straight out of the chat with a one-click button and pasted into the user's own documents, reused as a client email, a template or a step-by-step note — no permission request is described anywhere. The publisher attaches one condition rather than a restriction: because the model can be wrong, the answer must be checked against the cited sources before it is used. On the other side of the exchange, prompts are not recycled: the terms state that Haufe neither uses customer input nor lets anyone else use it to train the underlying machine learning models, and the privacy notice repeats this for the large language model. Chat history is stored against the user ID to deliver the service, and usage analytics — the exchange plus the thumbs-up or thumbs-down feedback — are anonymised before any reporting. Copying is limited only by the ban on reusing content for purposes other than one's own and on entering personal data in the question field.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The product page states that all data sits in the Microsoft Azure cloud on European servers and is not used to train large language models or otherwise made available for developing them. The FAQ repeats that data is processed exclusively in European data centres, and the privacy notice puts it contractually: the agreed processing takes place solely in an EU member state or another EEA contracting state. One reservation is published rather than hidden — transfers to the United States for maintenance and support cannot be entirely ruled out, and each such transfer is covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses under Articles 44 and following. Among the sub-processors, Mixpanel is a US company, but data is pseudonymised before transmission and storage is contractually confined to the EU; Usersnap keeps its data in its own Austrian infrastructure. No specific hosting country is named for CoPilot Tax itself. The German hosting location and the ISO 27001, 27017, 27018, SOC 2 and C5 certifications advertised by Haufe apply to its separate Copilot API offering, not to this assistant.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting CoPilot Tax.
- The publisher states the AI can be factually wrong and puts verification on the user: treating a fluent answer as settled is the main professional risk
- Leaning on the assistant for routine research can erode the habit of reading the primary source, exactly the skill a tax practice is paid for
- Answer depth depends on the edition subscribed, so an answer may be thin for reasons the user cannot see
- The terms of use forbid entering personal data in the prompt, which forces real cases to be abstracted and can distort the question asked
- Responsibility for the output is transferred entirely to the customer by the terms, and permanent availability is expressly not guaranteed
- The product's own terms and privacy notice name different Haufe entities, and the terms link to the CoPilot HR address while announcing the CoPilot Tax one
- No country restriction is published, but the tool covers German tax law in German only, and no funding rounds are known for this privately held publisher
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Effectively none for an existing subscriber. There is nothing to install and nothing to configure: the assistant already sits inside Haufe Steuer Office and opens from a portlet on its home page, with no separate registration and no second sign-in. A free trial is unlocked within minutes. Mobile use takes four browser steps and no app. The only case needing help is a subscription bought through a specialist reseller, where the reseller has to step in. Integrating the assistant into another system through the Copilot API is a different matter and a genuine development project.
Deployment
Supported languages
Behind CoPilot Tax
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement CoPilot Tax.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is CoPilot Tax?
Can I use it without a Haufe Steuer Office subscription?
Does it cost extra on top of my subscription?
Where do the answers come from?
Are my questions used to train the AI?
Can I rely on the answers as legally binding?
Do I need to install an app to use it on my phone?
Can it be plugged into our own systems?
Is the assistant identical in every edition?
Who do I contact if something goes wrong?
Should you pick CoPilot Tax?
CoPilot Tax is a deliberately narrow product, and that is its argument. Rather than competing with general chatbots on breadth, it restricts itself to one closed corpus — the vetted tax library its publisher has been maintaining for decades — and makes traceability the selling point: every answer ends with the sources it used, linked back to the original document. For a German tax practice, that is the difference between a plausible paragraph and a checkable one. The commercial logic follows the same line. The assistant has no price of its own; it is bundled into all four editions of Haufe Steuer Office, with no usage cap. The entry cost is therefore the database, from 989 EUR net a year for three users, which puts the tool out of reach of anyone not already committed to that ecosystem. The data protection posture is unusually detailed for an AI assistant, with a dedicated privacy notice and terms, named sub-processors, European processing and a clear statement that prompts never feed model training. Three reservations deserve to travel with the recommendation. The publisher itself warns that the model can err and places the duty of verification on the user, which means the time saved on research is partly spent on checking. Answer depth varies with the edition subscribed, so two customers of the same product do not get the same assistant. And the shop that sells it is closed to automated access and publishes no robots.txt, which makes independent verification of the current terms and prices harder than it should be — the figures here come from a dated public archive rather than the live page. Within its scope, however, this is a carefully built and honestly documented tool.
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