belege.ai Alternative 2026: An Honest Comparison for Incoming Invoices

#TL;DR

• belege.ai is an AI agent for receipt collection. It starts from your bank transactions, searches your mailbox, logs into supplier portals with a browser agent, and retrieves what is missing. Day-to-day operation runs through Telegram. Billing is by AI consumption: 39, 90, or 199 EUR/month.
• NameQuick Invoices is preparatory bookkeeping with a review step: invoice intake by email forwarding, upload, or portal connection, reading XRechnung and ZUGFeRD data straight from the XML, checking structure, mandatory fields, and profile, your release, and export as a DATEV EXTF file.
• The real difference is not "agent versus no agent" but what happens after collection. belege.ai optimizes the fetching. NameQuick Invoices optimizes the checking and the clean handover.
• On price, the difference is predictability: belege.ai bills by AI consumption and publishes no document volumes. NameQuick Invoices publishes fixed invoice allowances per plan.
• On the tax advisor, the two differ by design: belege.ai deliberately gives the firm no account, just a monthly package behind a login-free link. NameQuick Invoices is workspace-based, so client mandates stay separated.

If you are looking for a belege.ai alternative, you are usually facing one of two questions. Either you would rather not have an agent working with your portal credentials, or you are missing the step between "the receipt arrived" and "the tax advisor can post it". This comparison answers both without talking the competition down.

Everything stated about belege.ai comes from their own public pages, checked on 2026-07-29 and linked under Sources below. Where something is not stated there, we say so explicitly instead of turning it into a missing feature.

#What belege.ai does well

The belege.ai approach is genuinely interesting and should not be dismissed as marketing.

The agent reverses the usual direction. Instead of waiting for receipts to trickle in, it starts at the bank transactions: every debit should have a receipt, and where there is none, it goes and fetches it. Per their own description it searches the mailbox and logs into online portals through a browser. For portals with two-factor authentication, the code is relayed through Telegram.

Telegram is in fact the interface. Meal receipts, travel expenses, and self-issued receipts are created by the agent right in the chat. For self-employed people who photograph receipts on the go anyway, that is a very short path.

The handover to the accounting firm is deliberately lightweight. The firm gets no account of its own but a monthly package: CSV plus all PDFs, DATEV-ready, behind a login-free link. The reasoning is sound: firms do not want yet another tool.

The structure is thought through as well. A holding company, an operating GmbH, and shareholdings can each be set up as separate entities, each with its own receipts, bank accounts, and bookings, switchable from the account menu. Servers are in Germany.

If your main problem is "I am constantly missing receipts for debits and I do not want to hunt them down myself", belege.ai solves exactly that.

#Where the agent approach rubs for small teams

Three things are worth knowing beforehand.

The agent needs your portal credentials. A browser agent that logs in "like a human" has to be given credentials, and with 2FA the second factor has to travel through the chat. belege.ai states that credentials are stored encrypted. It is still a decision you should make deliberately, especially for portals that also hold payment details or contracts. If you would rather not make that trade-off at all, our GetMyInvoices comparison covers the same discussion on a second example.

Billing by AI consumption means it is hard to budget. The three plans are 39, 90, and 199 EUR/month and are explicitly billed "by AI consumption rather than per click". Their public pages state no receipt or document volume attached to a plan. For a business with strongly fluctuating receipt volume, it is therefore not clear up front which plan it will land in.

There are no statements about structured e-invoicing. XRechnung, ZUGFeRD, and EN 16931 do not appear on the public pages we checked. That does not mean the product cannot handle them — it means it is not advertised. If you will increasingly receive structured e-invoices in 2027 and 2028 and need to know whether a file is cleanly built at all, ask about it specifically before deciding.

A fourth point concerns wording rather than function: belege.ai advertises "Revisionssicher nach GoBD" (audit-proof per GoBD) and cites GoBD § 146. We phrase this deliberately differently, and the reason is below.

#NameQuick Invoices: the other approach

NameQuick Invoices does not start at collection but at checking and handover. The path is: invoice chaos in, DATEV-ready out.

#Intake without forcing credentials

You forward invoices to an address belonging to your workspace, or you upload them. For supplier portals there are additional portal connections, limited in number by plan, whose behaviour we document on a dedicated transparency page. The difference from the agent model is not "portals or no portals" but that forwarding is the normal case and a portal connection is the exception you set up deliberately.

#Reading the XML instead of guessing

For ZUGFeRD and XRechnung, NameQuick Invoices reads the structured fields straight from the embedded XML. Only when there is no XML does it fall back to text extraction, and to OCR for scans. Every field gets a confidence score; uncertain fields are flagged for review instead of passing through silently.

#Checking structure and mandatory fields

An e-invoice can arrive in formally correct shape and still be unusable. NameQuick Invoices checks the file structure, the mandatory fields, and basic invoice consistency (net plus tax equals total), and detects the profile — for ZUGFeRD and Factur-X: MINIMUM, BASIC WL, BASIC, EN 16931, and EXTENDED, plus XRechnung. The result names each individual check.

An important qualification: this is a structured invoice validation, not a legal certification tool, and it does not replace a formal external conformity assessment. Two of these tools are free and usable in the browser without an account: the e-invoice validator and the e-invoice viewer. You can check a file today, before deciding anything.

#A human release

Before export you see the invoices in a review view, including duplicate detection. Nothing enters the export that you have not released.

#A DATEV EXTF file, honestly named

The export produces a DATEV EXTF file (Buchungsstapel) or a CSV. That is a file export followed by a manual import, not a live connection to the DATEV API and not a Marketplace integration. How the format works is covered in detail in the DATEV export guide.

#Hosting, originals, audit trail

Data is stored in the EU (Google Cloud europe-west1, Vercel functions in Paris). Original documents are stored unchanged and never overwritten, and every step from intake to export is recorded in the event history.

#Direct comparison

#About the GoBD wording, because it often gets lost

belege.ai writes "Revisionssicher nach GoBD" and points to a frozen PDF snapshot documenting the original state of each receipt.

We phrase this more cautiously on purpose, and that is not modesty but a reading of the legal situation. "Revisionssicher" is not a seal that software earns on its own: the GoBD place requirements on the entire process inside a company, not on a single tool. That is why we say GoBD-supporting workflow. NameQuick Invoices provides the technical building blocks — immutable originals, a complete event history, a traceable export — and advertises neither a certification nor certified audit-proof archiving.

We also give no tax or legal advice. Whether your specific process is GoBD-compliant, and how long you must retain which documents, is a question for your tax advisor. That is the most honest sentence a software vendor can write on this topic.

#Who should pick what

belege.ai fits if your bottleneck is collection: lots of subscription and platform invoices sitting in portals, a bank account full of debits without receipts, and a willingness to hand the agent your logins. If you work from your phone anyway, the Telegram interface is a real advantage.

NameQuick Invoices fits if your bottleneck is the handover: you increasingly receive XRechnung and ZUGFeRD and want to see whether the mandatory details are complete before anything gets posted; you want to release invoices yourself before export; you need a DATEV EXTF file; and you want to know in advance what the month will cost.

For bookkeeping services and small firms, the separation by workspace is the point: Core allows up to three workspaces, Team an unlimited number. If you want to keep several mandates cleanly apart, the Candis comparison and the digital invoice processing guide cover the matching building blocks.

#What comes next

The idea behind belege.ai — think from the bank account and ask which transaction is missing a receipt — is the right one. Completeness is exactly what we are working on at the moment: a reconciliation between the bank statement and the invoices received, so that what is still missing becomes visible before month end.

This is explicitly not available yet. It is in development and is not part of the product you can subscribe to today. We mention it because a comparison that hides the strongest idea on the other side would be incomplete — but we do not count it as a feature until it ships. What works today is the path from invoice intake through checking to the DATEV EXTF file.

#Conclusion

belege.ai and NameQuick Invoices solve adjacent but different problems. One fetches the receipts that are missing. The other makes sure the documents you already have are checked and ready to hand over.

If you receive structured e-invoices, want to release them before export, and need a predictable price per invoice, NameQuick Invoices is the better fit. The demo costs nothing and needs no credit card: three invoices and one CSV export are enough to walk the whole flow once. DATEV EXTF export is unlocked by the free 14-day trial.

#FAQ

#Is belege.ai accounting software?

By their own account, no. belege.ai collects and organizes receipts and prepares the bookkeeping; the posting still happens in DATEV, usually at the tax firm. The same applies to NameQuick Invoices: both are preparatory bookkeeping, not accounting software.

#What does belege.ai cost in comparison?

belege.ai lists 39, 90, and 199 EUR per month and bills by AI consumption; no corresponding document volume is published. NameQuick Invoices bills per invoice per month: Demo 0 EUR for 3 invoices, Starter 9 EUR for 50, Core 19 EUR for 200, Team 39 EUR for 1,000. DATEV EXTF export is included from Core.

#Can NameQuick Invoices fetch documents from supplier portals?

Yes, through portal connections, whose number depends on the plan. The default route remains email forwarding or upload, which require no stored credentials.

#Does NameQuick Invoices check an XRechnung?

Yes. It checks file structure, mandatory fields, basic invoice consistency, and the detected profile, each itemized separately. It is a structured invoice validation, not a legal certification tool, and it does not replace a formal external conformity assessment. You can check a single file for free and without an account in the e-invoice validator.

#Is there a live DATEV interface?

Not on our side. NameQuick Invoices produces a DATEV EXTF file (or CSV) that you or your tax firm import. If you need a permanently synced connection, look for an interface partner on the DATEV Marketplace.

#Is NameQuick Invoices revisionssicher?

We deliberately do not use that term as a promise. NameQuick Invoices offers a GoBD-supporting workflow with immutable originals and a complete event history, but it is not a certified archiving solution. Whether your overall process is GoBD-compliant is for your tax advisor to judge.

#Sources

Statements about belege.ai come from their public pages, last checked on 2026-07-29:

• belege.ai — home page (how the agent works, Telegram, plans at 39/90/199 EUR, billing by AI consumption, free start without a credit card, entities, handover to the tax firm, servers in Germany, GoBD statement)

Statements about NameQuick Invoices refer to the functionality actually shipped; for plans and allowances see the pricing overview.