Swiss accounting services, English-output, foreign-owner-friendly, canton-aware.

You are a founder scoping the recurring cost of owning a Swiss company before you incorporate, and you want to know what compliance actually looks like month by month. You already run a foreign-owned Swiss AG or GmbH and your current provider is not delivering (late filings, English communication gaps, surprise invoices). Or you are a foreign parent company mandating outsourced books for a Swiss subsidiary and you want one provider who handles bookkeeping, VAT, annual accounts and cantonal tax end-to-end. This page walks what we deliver, how the Swiss rules bind you, and where we hand off to adjacent services.

Monthly — bookkeeping, receivables and payables, VAT preparation

Ledger postings, bank reconciliation across all CHF and foreign-currency accounts, receivables and payables processing, monthly VAT working file, and a management snapshot showing month-to-date revenue, cost and working-capital position. The VAT working file is carried forward each month so the quarterly return is a consolidation, not a scramble. Deliverables are pushed through a secure portal; all correspondence is in English.

Quarterly — VAT return filing, management report

The default Swiss VAT cadence is quarterly; we prepare and electronically file the VAT return with ESTV under MWSTG art. 10, covering input-VAT reconciliation and cross-check against the ledger before submission. You receive a quarterly management report in addition to the statutory filing: it is short, operational, and written for a founder who does not want to read a 40-page financial statement. An annual VAT option exists for smaller entities subject to ESTV approval; we confirm eligibility on request.

Annually — statutory accounts, tax return, annual report

OR/CO-compliant statutory accounts (balance sheet, profit and loss statement, notes) under OR art. 957 and the following articles, together with the cantonal corporate tax return for your canton of registration. Audit liaison is included where a limited or ordinary audit is triggered. The annual report is produced where legally required or where your board or parent company prefers it. All filings are archived against the 10-year retention rule under OR art. 958f in verifiable electronic form.

Swiss bookkeeping duty is set by OR art. 957. The rule has two tiers. Sole proprietorships and partnerships with annual turnover below CHF 500,000 may keep simplified cash-basis records (income, expenditure, asset register). Above CHF 500,000 of annual turnover, full double-entry bookkeeping is mandatory. Separately, every limited company (AG and GmbH) must maintain double-entry bookkeeping from day one regardless of turnover, because the rule is triggered by the legal form, not by the revenue figure. This is where many foreign founders trip: a GmbH with CHF 30,000 of first-year turnover still keeps full double-entry books.

Books must include journal, general ledger, and supporting sub-ledgers for receivables, payables, inventory and fixed assets. They may be kept in an official Swiss language or in English under OR art. 958c, alongside the currency of business operations. Electronic systems are permitted provided integrity and retrievability are preserved over the retention period.

The CHF 100,000 threshold, and the foreign-business exception

Swiss VAT registration is mandatory once worldwide annual turnover from taxable supplies reaches CHF 100,000 (MWSTG art. 10). For foreign businesses supplying goods or services into Switzerland, the rule is stricter: once the worldwide CHF 100,000 threshold is met, VAT liability begins from the first franc of Swiss turnover, with no domestic-threshold relief. The registration authority is ESTV (the Federal Tax Administration), and registration is typically completed within five to fifteen business days after application. Voluntary registration below the threshold is possible and can be advantageous when input-VAT recovery on Swiss supplier invoices exceeds the administrative burden.

Quarterly versus annual VAT returns

The default Swiss VAT return cadence is quarterly, filed electronically via the ESTV portal. An annual filing option exists for smaller entities with prior ESTV approval; eligibility typically hinges on a combination of turnover size and reporting history. If you think your entity could qualify, speak to us about eligibility before submitting the request; we have found the annual option valuable for low-volume holding or SPV entities where quarterly filings are disproportionate.

Swiss VAT rates in one line

The standard rate is 8.1% (effective since 1 January 2024). The accommodation rate for hotel stays with breakfast is 3.8%. The reduced rate is 2.6% on food, medicine, printed materials, and menstrual hygiene products. For a deeper walk-through of rate application, the place-of-supply rules and the 2026 platform rule for online marketplaces, see our full Swiss VAT page.

Our team operates across the four accounting systems foreign founders most commonly bring us: bexio (the Swiss SME default, cloud-native), Abacus (the incumbent mid-market Swiss system, deeper VAT module), Banana (lightweight desktop accounting common for small entities and associations), and Odoo (full ERP where accounting is one module of many). If your Swiss entity is already on one of these, we work inside it. If you are deciding from a blank sheet at incorporation, we walk the trade-offs in the onboarding call.

Migrations follow a three-phase playbook: chart-of-accounts mapping from the legacy system to the target, historical-data carry-over (typically two fiscal years to keep comparatives intact), and a parallel-run period of one to two closing cycles to verify the migration before the legacy system is archived. We do not charge migrations as open-ended time-and-materials; scope is agreed up front.

Outsourcing the accounting function to a Swiss provider is standard practice for foreign-owned Swiss entities. No in-house finance team is required; we operate as your Swiss finance function from our Zug office. Books may be kept in an official Swiss language or in English under OR art. 958c, so you can read your ledger, management pack and draft accounts in a language your board understands. Some cantonal filings (notably final tax returns) must be submitted in an official language, and we handle that translation layer transparently.

The one caveat is board composition, not accounting. A Swiss AG must have at least one board member with signatory authority resident in Switzerland (OR art. 718.4); a GmbH must have at least one managing officer with sole or joint signature resident in Switzerland (OR art. 814.3). This is separate from the accounting function and is handled by either a relocating founder, a Swiss-resident partner, or a nominee-director arrangement. If that is your open question, see nominee director services for the full treatment.

Ten-year retention rule

All accounting records must be retained for 10 years under OR art. 958f. Scope includes books, vouchers, accounting-relevant correspondence, annual accounts and audit reports. Electronic storage is permitted provided records remain readable, unaltered and retrievable across the full retention period, and the underlying file format does not go obsolete during that window.

What happens if you miss a filing

The cantonal tax authority issues an automatic reminder. If the deadline is still not met, the authority proceeds to a discretionary assessment, estimating your taxable income without the benefit of your accounts. The resulting bill is typically materially higher than a filed return would have produced. Interest is charged on the outstanding tax, and penalties apply; repeat or severe cases can expose directors to cantonal criminal sanctions. In practice, extension requests are routinely granted when filed before the standard deadline, which is why we build extension pushes into the operational calendar as a fallback, not as a first line.

Director personal liability — why accounting hygiene matters at board level

Swiss board members carry fiduciary duties under OR art. 754 and related articles. Where books are incomplete, inaccurate, or filed late, the board's diligence defence narrows. This is a governance point, not a fear point: reliable accounting is part of the evidentiary record the board relies on if a dispute, audit or creditor action ever tests the reasonableness of a business decision. Foreign founders who run multiple Swiss entities routinely ask us to standardise accounting hygiene across the group for precisely this reason.

Electronic submission pathways have matured across cantons. The 2023 update to the Commercial Register Ordinance (HRegV) expanded digital-signature acceptance for filings, and ESTV has been steadily expanding the electronic-submission scope on the VAT side. The direction of travel is that ESTV is increasingly expecting standardised electronic accounting data on audit requests for larger entities, which is one more reason to pick an accounting system and chart of accounts that can export clean machine-readable data.

The STAF reform is now fully in force: the former holding-company special status has been phased out and replaced by the participation-exemption mechanics at federal level and by the Patent Box and R&D super-deductions at cantonal level. For holding structures this primarily changes how effective tax is computed on dividend income, not how the books are kept. Separately, Zurich legislated an effective-rate cut that took effect in 2025 and Ticino and Basel-Land moved in 2025 as well (Ticino by -3.11 pp and Basel-Land by -2.45 pp, the largest two moves that year).

For crypto-adjacent entities, the 2021 DLT Act remains the backbone; the 2025 Federal Council consultation on Payment Token amendments is live and worth tracking for anyone running or planning a token-issuing vehicle in Zug. Treatment of tokens for accounting purposes continues to depend on classification (utility, payment, asset), and the Swiss Tax Administration's guidance is reviewed annually.

1. 1. Initial consultation — 30 minutes. We walk your entity, your current setup and your open compliance risks. No commitment. No pressure to switch providers mid-call.
2. 2. Scope agreement and engagement letter — 3 to 5 days. We issue a custom proposal. Once you sign, we issue a formal engagement letter (Mandatsvertrag) that names deliverables, cadence, escalation points and the retention archive.
3. 3. Historical-data handover — 2 to 4 weeks. Chart-of-accounts review, opening balances, prior filings audit, reconciliation of carry-forward items. Where you are switching provider, we coordinate the handover directly with the outgoing team.
4. 4. First monthly close — end of month one. We run the first full monthly cycle, pre-agreed deliverables on the agreed day. From here, the calendar above is the cadence.