Do it yourself or use an accountant? An honest split

With a modern system, these things cost you less time than collecting them does:

• Receipts and expenses. Photographed with your phone, the amount is read and allocated. Even without a QR code.
• Supplier invoices. If they arrive by email, they go straight into processing. QR invoices are recognised and come with a booking suggestion.
• Payments. Your e-banking is connected. Incoming payments are matched to open invoices automatically, and payment orders go out the other way.
• Your care invoices. The billing file that goes to the health insurer anyway becomes an entry — without you touching it a second time.

Paying an hourly rate for all of that had a technical reason for a long time. It doesn't any more.

• Account allocation in doubtful cases. Most entries are obvious. The few that aren't are better clarified once properly than got wrong twelve times.
• The VAT statement. It comes out of the accounts — but whether your split between exempt care and taxable consulting is right is better checked by someone else.
• The chart of accounts. Set up properly once, it carries for years. That is one hour of advice that always pays off.

• The year-end. Accruals, provisions, valuations — that's where experience counts, and a mistake costs more than the fee.
• The tax return and everything involving the authorities.
• Special cases. Changing legal form, your first employee, investments, restructuring.
• The outside view. Someone who tells you what the numbers mean.

Take thirty receipts a month. Collecting, sorting, handing them over, having them entered — at an accountant's rate of CHF 150 that quickly adds up to several hundred francs a month for work with no decisions in it.

Photographing those same thirty receipts takes two and a half minutes.

The difference isn't only money. It's time too: book as you go and you see as you go how the year is running. Hand everything over once a year and you find out the following spring.

As soon as your figures are current, things become possible that weren't before. You can see which health insurer owes you money and since when. You spot the VAT threshold before you cross it. And when proof is asked for — statistics, a residual-cost statement — the figures are ready instead of being reconstructed.