Built for Swiss books

QR-bill, with the structured address

The QR-bill has been the only payment slip in Switzerland since October 2022. The red and orange slips are gone, and with them the reference formats older software still hangs on to.

TILL generates the Swiss QR Code to the SIX implementation guidelines, with a structured address. The unstructured variant is being phased out, and writing it today builds you a migration you do not need.

Swico invoice data belongs with it: the MWST breakdown travels inside the slip so the other side can read it by machine instead of retyping it.

MWST, at the rates in force today

Rates in force since 01.01.2024

Three rates have applied since 1 January 2024. TILL knows them and knows the older ones too, because a period straddling the changeover needs both.

The MWST return is computed from the entries rather than kept alongside them. For every figure you can see which entries produced it. That is the verifiability OR Art. 957a Abs. 2 requires, and MWSTG Art. 70 Abs. 1 binds VAT bookkeeping to exactly that commercial-law standard.

8.1 percent

Standard rate. Figure 303 on the return.

3.8 percent

Special rate for accommodation.

2.6 percent

Reduced rate, for food, books and medicines among others.

Kontenrahmen KMU

A new company starts on the Kontenrahmen KMU, not on an empty list and not on an American chart of accounts somebody translated.

The account numbers are the ones your Treuhänder expects. That sounds small and it decides whether the first handover takes twenty minutes or an afternoon.

ISO 20022, both directions

Statements arrive as camt.053, credit notifications as camt.054. Payment instructions go out as pain.001. These are the formats Swiss banks actually speak.

Reconciliation runs on the reference from the QR-bill. When a customer pays with a slip TILL generated, the payment finds its own invoice.

Retention, and who actually owes it

OR Art. 958f requires business books and supporting documents to be kept for ten years. That duty falls on you, not on your software, and no vendor can take it off you.

What TILL contributes is the form: the ledger is append-only, corrections are reversing entries, and documents sit with the entries they belong to. Because everything is in one file on your machine, retention is a backup you control rather than a subscription that has to keep running.

Said plainly: append-only bookkeeping is good practice and the basis on which a third party can form a reliable judgement under OR Art. 958 Abs. 1. It is not a rule any article states in those words.

What does not work yet

As of July 2026

TILL is pre-alpha. The standards above are specified and built, but the ledger is not yet ready for you to keep real books on. We say it here because otherwise it is the kind of sentence you find only after installing.

There is no connection to the ESTV for electronic filing, and not out of neglect: no public submission interface exists to connect to. The return is prepared; you file it.