There are five main thematic sections in the magazine: "Legal and Everyday Life Issues", "Investment and Provision for Retirement", "Home and Living", "Tax", "Health and Insurance".

Every month there is an extensive section providing a comparison of interest rates for various savings products, shares and investment funds, as well as loans for buying property or a car.

As a consequence of several investigations published in Finanztest, Ilse Aigner, the Federal Minister for Consumer Protection announced in December 2010 that she also intends to make use of mystery shoppers to check the reliability of investment advice offered by banks.

If they agree to abide by the specified terms and conditions and pay a one-off fee, providers are allowed to advertise using Stiftung Warentest's overall verdicts on quality and the Foundation's logos.

If mistakes are made, the Foundation deals with them openly and honestly, as was the case in 2002, with the publication of the incorrectly calculated results for the Riester-Rente (a state-subsidised privately funded pension introduced and named after the German politician Walter Riester).

It was the first and only time in the then almost 40-year history of the Foundation that this happened – over 100,000 copies of the magazine with the corrected information were subsequently sold at newsstands and it was the most popular Finanztest issue that year.