Identity Vault

German bureaucracy consists largely of the same handful of details, over and over. Name, address, date of birth, tax ID, tax number, bank details, and for the self-employed the company name and VAT ID on top. Every authority, every portal, every form wants it afresh. The Identity Vault is the answer: you enter your master data once, and from then on the tools on werkzeu.ge fill their forms with it themselves.

What matters is how the vault protects your data. Everything is encrypted right in your browser before anything is stored anywhere. This is called zero-knowledge: the server sees - if anything - only unreadable ciphertext, never your plain data. The key is derived from your password and never leaves your device. Nobody but you can open the vault, us included.

The vault is organised into five areas. Personal: first and last name, street and house number, postal code and city, phone, email, marital status. Business: company name, VAT ID, trade register number, legal form. Tax and social insurance: tax class, federal state, gross annual income, birth year, child allowances, church tax liability, type of health insurance, tax ID, tax number, tax office and social insurance number. Bank details: IBAN, BIC, account holder. And identity and residence: date of birth, place of birth, nationality and residence permit.

These are exactly the fields that get needed again and again - from tax calculators through cancellation letters to invoices. A tool that can pre-fill reaches into your Identity Vault and takes the matching details, instead of you typing them once more. That not only saves time, it also prevents transposed digits in the IBAN or the eleven-digit tax ID.

The vault can be locked and unlocked. As long as it is locked, your data is encrypted and unreadable to anyone, including any other tool. To edit or pre-fill you briefly unlock it with your password. Afterwards you can lock it again with one click, for example when you are on a shared computer.

Because everything sits locally in your browser, there is no cloud account that could be hacked, no central database with the ID details of thousands of people, no sale of your information. The Identity Vault is deliberately built to be data-frugal: it is your private filing cabinet for the numbers the authorities keep asking for - and you keep the key.