In a professional firm, an experienced partner carries years of client history, much of it in personal files and notes. It works well, because the partner is always there. Clients trust that person, colleagues ask that person, and nobody has a reason to move the knowledge somewhere else.
WGKK Gruppe, a tax advisory and audit firm with several locations in Germany, found out how much depends on that when an experienced senior partner was absent from one day to the next. Melanie Kammerer, auditor, tax advisor and partner of WGKK Gruppe, told DATEV magazin in April 2026: "For me, that was a key moment."
What WGKK Gruppe did
The team found important material on a personal drive and in handwritten notes, outside the document management system. Kammerer recalls: "We invested a great deal of time reviewing and sorting those notes." And then: "That was the moment I said: 'Folks, this must not happen again.'"
Meetings are now documented to a uniform standard, and the minutes go into the document management system, open to all authorized staff. Processes are harmonized across locations. In Kammerer's words: "If one location does the process one way round and the other does it the other way, we look at why. In the end we decide which way is better and pass it on." New colleagues get mentors, location representatives meet regularly and handovers for staff changes or longer holidays follow clear rules.
What it already gives the business
WGKK drew a principle from the experience, which DATEV magazin sums up this way: knowledge must never depend on individual people. Kammerer describes the result: "We have created a fixed place where all information flows in."
Fellow partner Sebastian Prokop, tax advisor and partner at WGKK, who took over his first location in 2010, puts the idea simply: "Access to information should not depend on who happens to be physically carrying it." The article reports no figures. Its author concludes that a short-term absence no longer shakes the firm's structures.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
WGKK now captures what happens in meetings and how processes run. Knowledge is also passed on in the context of real cases, and regular exchange rounds between locations spread what one office learns to the others. The next layer is the reasoning partners carry about individual clients: why a structure was chosen, which risks were weighed, what a client prefers.
A Company Brain could link that reasoning to the minutes and documents already in the document management system, so any authorized colleague can follow a client's story. The cross-location comparison would get easier too, because the reasons behind each way of working would already be on record. That is our hypothesis, and the article does not describe it.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
An owner would track the share of client files and meeting minutes in the shared system, how many processes run the same way at every location and how smoothly handovers go during holidays. A holiday is a small rehearsal for a sale, and each one shows where knowledge still sits with one person.
A buyer asks what happens to the business the day the owner is gone. WGKK answered that question in practice, and a firm preparing to sell can rehearse it the same way. Client tax data is highly confidential, so keep access role based, log it and set retention rules for minutes and notes.
The problem behind this case
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About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show WGKK Gruppe staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 14, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside WGKK Gruppe. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected]. Quotes from the German-language source are translated by our team.
Primary source: Trade magazine article (DATEV, a software provider to tax firms), DATEV magazin, April 2026. Available at www.datev.de/content/dam/markenassets/themen-und-produktgruppen/datev-magazin/datev-magazin-pdf-dateien-/DATEV_magazin_2026_04.pdf.