Fiscal law in Switzerland

(Statement in advance: The Hypersoft system meets the GoBD requirements of Germany, among other things. This means that these tools and this security are also available to you in Switzerland, regardless of the country settings.)

There is no legal obligation to use cash registers in Switzerland. The core of proper cash management there is the cash book, which is comparable to the open cash register in Germany and must be kept promptly, completely, comprehensibly and unalterably. The federal tax offices would like to make it possible to check the receipt for the booking, whereby the organizational path in accounting is only via the cash book as a bottleneck for cash transactions. Swiss law does not yet provide for technical manipulation prevention such as certified modules.

The Swiss Tax Conference requires that accounting transactions can be checked individually at any time and without significant effort from the receipt to the closing entry or tax return (and vice versa). To meet this requirement, a document must be dated, numbered, assigned to an account, and checked for VAT correctness, for example, and stored in a logical form once it has been entered. When filing, it should be remembered that the receipts must be legible for 10 years, which is a great challenge, especially with thermal printing receipts.

In the cash book itself, this leads to the entry of the date, a sequential document number, a meaningful text with reference to the issuer's document, the amount, the account assignment and a balance. In a Swiss dissertation as well as in a decision of a tax appeals commission, reference was made to explanations from Germany concerning proper (cash) accounting. With the topic, how promptly a bookkeeping has to take place this leads to § 146 AO, which demands a daily recording of the cash receipts and cash expenditures. The Appeals Commission therefore considered a daily update of the cash book to be proper, even for Swiss circumstances. These examples from case law show that at least in companies with cash income a daily updating of the cash book is obligatory.

According to item 957 paragraph 1 of the Code of Obligations, all companies with an annual turnover of more than CHF 500,000 have a duty to keep books and accounts. The smaller companies can decide for themselves how extensive they want to do their accounting. For such companies it is possible to make only one income-expenditure statement and to document their financial situation. Even with this simple accounting system, the cash book must contain the following minimum information: date, document number, posting text, amount, account assignment and balance.

Operating income, operating expenditure, private withdrawals and private deposits must be recorded in a cash book. Correct chronological entries of income and expenditure must be made in accordance with the principles of proper accounting (OR Art. 957a para. 2)

required. Furthermore, it is not allowed to post all receipts only once a year. The following principles and requirements apply to a properly kept cash book:

No posting without document

All vouchers must be kept for ten years (OR Art. 958f para. 4 and para. 1)
Postings and documents must not be able to be changed (OR Art. 958f para. 4)
A regular cash audit is required
There must be no negative cash on hand.
Transfers between cash desk and bank must also be booked
Everything must be booked chronologically, no arbitrary day sequence (OR Art. 957a para. 2)

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