Last modified on 23. May 2018

Printing and answering e-mails takes up a lot of our time. Please try to make it as easy as possible for us to process your e-mails in a timely manner by sticking to these guidelines:

• Ideally, send documents as PDF and merge them into a single file (there are many free programs you can use that let you do it easily via drag-and-drop). The fewer files we have to open, the better.
• Relatedly, please only send the documents we actually need. We ONLY need documents to support what you claim in your application, and only one per claim (e.g. either your rent contract OR proof of rent payment). Documents we DON’T need include: your student ID, your regular ID, proof of matriculation, proof for more than one month when amounts stay the same (e.g. for rent or jobs).
• Please also DON’T send us complete, unmarked bank statements for the whole calculation period. If you want to use bank statements as proof, please only send us the relevant pages and mark the relevant transactions and/or blank out everything that’s not relevant for your application.
• Please don‘t send ZIP or RAR files, as they might pose a security risk and will most likely be deleted by our mail server before they even get to our inbox.
• Please don‘t send documents via external services. For security reasons we don’t follow links, so we won’t be able to access your documents.
• Please make sure the file sizes aren‘t too big. We don‘t need high-res images, and large files might be responsible for your e-mails not arriving.
• We need to be able to read and print your documents, so please make sure they‘re not too dark or too small.
• If you mark PDF documents on the computer textmarker-style, the markings often obscure the marked text when printed. Please try to avoid this by using a different style of marking, e.g. circling relevant parts.
• If for some reason you can’t send a file as PDF, please use another common format such as JPG, PNG or RTF.
• Please note that we don‘t automatically notify you about receiving your e-mail, so if you‘re unsure whether it has arrived, please ask.

Two tips for preparing your documents for sending via e-mail:

• You can create PDFs from any document by using a free PDF creation software. Those act like a „printer“, so you can go to the print view e.g. for bank statements and select the PDF software in the list of printers. Instead of printing on paper, it will save a copy of the document as PDF.
• You can create screenshots in Windows, at least, by using the „snipping tool“. It lets you select a portion of the screen to save as a picture, and you can also edit/mark it right there without having to copy/paste a screenshot into a different program.