Outsourced accounting in Switzerland — providers compared

A price for outsourced accounting says nothing on its own. It says something only once you know what it covers. In this table every price covers the same thing: the running bookkeeping, the VAT return, payroll accounting, the annual financial statements and the tax return, paid monthly.

That is why an offer here can look higher than one you obtained yourself. An offer without the annual statements is cheaper and not better — the statements arrive in spring as a separate invoice, and nobody lied to you. Two offers from two fiduciaries almost never compare the same thing. The figures in this table do.

Instead of a «from» figure, each row carries the price for a concrete business — from the side business with 15 documents a month to the established corporation with 400. Every value was collected individually: 3 of 4 providers calculate it in their own price calculator, the rest publish fixed price lists.

For the smallest sample business the offers lie between CHF 158.– and CHF 350.– a month; for the largest, between CHF 2’692.– and CHF 3’925.–. At the bottom the dearest offer costs 2.2 times the cheapest; at the top, 1.5 times.

Read those two ratios side by side — they tell you how much the choice of provider actually matters at your size. Where the base price weighs more than the volume, the offers spread far apart; where volume drives the price, they converge.

The most important difference appears on no price list: the unit of measure. Most charge by document — the invoices, receipts and debits that have to be posted. At least one charges by payment transaction, meaning the credits and debits on the bank account and credit card.

For a business that pays every invoice separately, the two come to the same thing. For one that works in cash, makes lump payments or accumulates many small documents with no payment of their own, they are two entirely different numbers — and two offers far apart, with neither provider having done anything wrong.

On top of that come items charged separately almost everywhere: each salary recipient, the VAT method — the net tax rate is simpler to file than the effective method and therefore cheaper — and the first-year setup. Check those three before you lay two monthly prices side by side.

Outsourcing is not handing over. Collecting and delivering documents stays with you, usually through a portal or a photo app. Payments are as a rule triggered by you; the fiduciary prepares them, you release them. New hires, contracts and account changes you report to them — what they do not know, they cannot post.

The gain is therefore not a hundred per cent. It sits where most of the time disappears: reconciling the accounts, the VAT return and the year-end close. Those are the tasks a program helps with least when you do not know what is right.

The counter-calculation has three items. First, the subscription for an accounting program; those prices are on the accounting software page. Second, your own time, at the rate you otherwise charge. Third, what the fiduciary ends up doing anyway.

The third item is the one most often forgotten. Annual statements and the tax return sit in no program — they are included in the prices in this table and absent from every software price. Buying them separately means you have not made the comparison, only postponed it.