Where these figures come from

Why «from» prices are worthless

Every fiduciary means something different by their «from» price: one a sole proprietorship without VAT, another a package including payroll, a third a price without the year-end close. Placed side by side, those figures produce a ranking with nothing to do with the services.

So we did not collect prices but defined businesses — and asked about each one separately at every provider, at identical scope.

How the values were obtained

3 of the 4 providers run a public price calculator. For those, a separate run takes place per sample business: a script fills the fields and reads the result from a fixed line. Date, inputs and source line are logged — checkable even if the provider changes the calculator later.

The remaining provider publishes a fixed price list; the tiers are read off and assigned. Where a tier is missing, the cell stays empty. No interpolation — a computed intermediate value would be a statement nobody made, and it would look exactly like a real one.

Sample business	SEBONA Treuhand	Findea.ch	Leuchtenstadt Treuhand	Paradies Treuhand
Side business15 documents/mo. · 0 payslips	CHF 158	CHF 221	CHF 340	CHF 350
Self-employed40 documents/mo. · 0 payslips	CHF 291	CHF 412	CHF 590	CHF 350
One-person GmbH50 documents/mo. · 1 payslip	CHF 409	CHF 564	CHF 650	CHF 600
GmbH with a team150 documents/mo. · 8 payslips	CHF 1’066	CHF 1’287	CHF 1’550	CHF 1’250
Established AG400 documents/mo. · 25 payslips	CHF 2’692	CHF 2’925	CHF 3’925	not researched

The mistake we made

At one provider the first run produced a plausible monthly price. It was wrong: the script had read the VAT line instead of the price line.

It did not stand out — 153 against 158 francs, and a result of the right order of magnitude does not get read twice. It surfaced when the numbers were checked: across all five sample businesses the ratio between the wrong figure and the right one was always identical. A constant factor across five independent cases is not a pricing model, it is a tax rate — 8.1 per cent spread over twelve months.

The cross-check confirmed the correction: the amended value matches the provider’s own advertising line on their home page.

An error that produces a plausible result never shows up in the reading. Only in the arithmetic.

What we deliberately do not do

No league table and no score. The cheapest provider differs by sample business, and a score would have to weight what cannot be weighted in general.

No estimated prices. Where a provider publishes nothing, the field stays empty — that is a statement about the provider, not about their level.

And no figures from comparison portals or press articles. The source is always the provider themselves: their calculator, their price list, their offer.