Together with Aachen Local Court and Aachen City Tax Office, the city of Aachen is a pilot location for the nationwide "Schneller Gründen" project. The project is part of the modernization agenda of the federal and state governments and aims to make it easier, faster and completely digital to set up companies in Germany.

Aachen will be one of the first locations in Germany to test the new digital combined application for business registration and tax registration under real conditions from July 2026. The pilot is being carried out together with the Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernization (BMDS), the Federal Digital Service and other federal ministries. Further pilot locations are Dresden, Düsseldorf, Fulda, Goslar, Hamburg, Mannheim, Munich and Nordfriesland.

Aachen has the best prerequisites for this: The city is one of the most dynamic start-up locations in Germany. With 1,731 new start-ups in 2025 and 4th place nationwide in terms of start-ups per 100,000 inhabitants, Aachen stands for technology and knowledge-based start-ups in particular. The close cooperation between RWTH Aachen University, FH Aachen, digitalHUB Aachen, GründerRegion Aachen and numerous other partners has been creating a strong innovation ecosystem for many years.

The pilot will initially focus on a combined application for business and tax registration for sole proprietorships. The aim is to avoid redundant data entry, improve data quality and significantly reduce processing times. Sole proprietorships account for more than 80 percent of all new business start-ups.

The City of Aachen is consistently pursuing the goal of expanding start-up-friendly and digital administrative services. The planned one-stop store with a once-only function is intended to significantly reduce the burden on founders and make administrative processes more efficient. Together with the Aachen District Court and the Aachen City Tax Office, the city has the necessary organizational and technical prerequisites for the successful implementation of the pilot. Lord Mayor Dr. Michael Ziemon is naturally delighted: "The fact that we are now one of the first pilot locations nationwide to participate in the development of faster and more digital start-up processes is the result of intensive work here in the city administration over the past few weeks and a great opportunity - for founders as well as for a modern and efficient administration." The pilot project is the starting signal for a project that will keep the partners involved throughout Germany busy for years to come. They are confident that they can already create noticeable relief for the administration and real added value for start-ups in the short term.

The administrative coordination of the project is carried out by the City of Aachen's digitization department. As the operational core instance, the business registration office in the Department of Safety and Order checks and records the data generated via the process and ensures that it is registered in the city's business register. The Digital Administration and IT Management department is responsible for the connection to the administration-wide specialist procedures and the prospective integration into the planned business portal. The Economic Development Department will support the connection to the regional start-up and innovation ecosystem and support the transfer to existing advisory and network structures.