Why does the parent company matter if the servers are in Germany?

Under the US CLOUD Act, a company subject to US jurisdiction can be required to produce data it controls, regardless of where that data physically sits. A European data centre operated by a US-owned provider therefore does not settle the question. Ladewig GmbH is a German company with no foreign parent.

Do you use AWS, Azure or Google Cloud?

No — not for the application, not for backups, and not for auxiliary services. This is a deliberate architectural decision rather than a temporary state, and we have written about the trade-offs it involves.

What happens to the data if we leave?

You can export everything at any time in open standard formats, at no extra cost. We recommend agreeing that point before signing with any vendor, including us — it is the clause most often missing.

Is the service GoBD compliant?

Aktenplatz provides the technical basis: unalterable storage, versioning, a complete audit trail and retention periods per document type. Compliance itself also requires organisational rules and documentation of the procedure, which we help you produce.

Hosting

Where your documents actually live

For most companies outside Germany this is the question that brought them here, so it comes first rather than in the footnotes.

German data centres only

Hetzner in Falkenstein and Nuremberg, with the database in Frankfurt am Main. Certified facilities, operated by German companies.

A German company, no foreign parent

Aktenplatz is developed and operated by Ladewig GmbH in Munich. There is no US parent company that could be compelled to hand over data.

GDPR by construction

Data processing agreement under Art. 28 GDPR, encrypted transfer, encrypted backups with 30 days of retention, deletion concept with defined periods.

Or your own hardware

Self-hosting on premises or in your own data centre is available. From roughly 75 users it usually becomes the cheaper option as well.

What we do not claim

German hosting is not a certification, and no data centre makes an organisation compliant on its own. What it does is remove one specific risk — that a foreign jurisdiction can reach your documents through the provider.

Everything else — retention periods, access rules, documenting your procedure — remains organisational work. We help with it, but we will not pretend the software does it for you. Ask us directly if you need specifics for your jurisdiction.