Building the EXIST Finanzplan: stipend, Sachkosten, Coaching, and the line items reviewers question

An EXIST Gründerstipendium budget is built from three distinct sources of funding, and confusing them is one of the most common Finanzplan mistakes. The Lebenshaltungskostenpauschale is the personal stipend paid to each founder to cover living costs - it is the headline number people mean when they say "EXIST pays X." The Sachausgaben (or Sachmittel) budget covers things the venture buys: equipment, material, services. The Coaching budget is a separate, capped pot for paying external advisors and accelerator programmes.

The pots do not flow into each other. You cannot underspend the Sachausgaben and pay yourself more stipend, and you cannot route the Coaching budget into a laptop. When you build the Finanzplan, plan each pot to its own logic - the stipend by team composition, the Sachausgaben by what the project genuinely needs in twelve months, the Coaching by the external help you have actually identified.

The stipend is paid per founder at rates that depend on qualification level - a university graduate, a PhD holder, and a technical staff member each sit at a different fixed rate, with a separate child allowance on top per dependent child. You do not negotiate these numbers and you do not put a salary expectation in the Finanzplan; you state who is on the team, their qualification, and the rate follows. Check the current published rates for your call, because they are periodically uprated and the exact figure on an old blog post may be out of date.

One thing founders consistently get wrong: the stipend is taxable income and is not a salary, so there is no employer social-security contribution and you remain responsible for your own health insurance. Plan your personal runway with that in mind. The stipend is designed to cover living costs for one person at a modest level, not to fund a comfortable lifestyle in an expensive city.

The Sachausgaben pot is where the Finanzplan reveals whether you have actually planned your year. A line that reads "Hardware and software: 8.000 €" tells the reviewer nothing and reads as a guess. A line that reads "2x developer laptops (16GB, ~1.800 € each), GPU cloud credits for model training (~2.400 €/year), design tooling licences (~600 €/year)" tells the reviewer you know exactly what you will spend money on and why. Itemise every meaningful line, attach a one-line justification tying it to a milestone, and round to realistic numbers, not multiples of a thousand.

Two rules that trip people up. First, EXIST funds the venture, not a research lab - reviewers push back on large equipment purchases that look like they belong on a university grant rather than a startup. Second, items above a defined threshold need multiple quotes (the Drei-Angebote-Regel) at the point of purchase, so do not plan a single expensive bespoke machine without acknowledging you will have to tender it. And do not plan to buy assets you will keep personally after the funding ends; the Projektträger expects Sachausgaben to serve the project, not your home office.

The Coaching pot is the most under-used part of EXIST. It exists to pay for external expertise the team genuinely lacks - a go-to-market consultant, a patent attorney for a first filing, an accelerator programme fee. Many teams leave it on the table because they do not know what to spend it on at application time, then scramble later. Plan it the same way you plan Sachausgaben: name the coaching you will buy, tie it to a gap in the team, and put a believable number against it.

A subtle point: do not use the Coaching budget to pay a Förderberatung a percentage of your grant. That is not coaching, the conflict of interest is obvious to reviewers, and commission-based grant consulting is exactly the cost EXIST funding is meant to make unnecessary. Coaching money is best spent on capabilities your venture keeps - skills, IP, customer access - not on a fee for having written the application.

Reviewers read the Finanzplan against the rest of the application. If your Ideenpapier says you will build a hardware prototype but your Sachausgaben contain no materials, that contradiction undercuts both sections. If your plan says you will run customer pilots in month six but your Coaching budget has no go-to-market line, the year does not hang together. The single best thing you can do for the Finanzplan is to write it last, after the milestone plan, so every number maps to a milestone you have already committed to in the prose.