Contents
- What ends up in the shoebox
- Worked example: one month of receipts, at 3 and at 5 minutes
- Scanning receipts and destroying the paper: what the federal portal says
- What an agent prepares, and what a person decides
- Annual VAT returns: fewer deadlines, a bigger shoebox
- How to measure your own cost per booking
- Frequently asked questions
Key points
- One booking by hand takes minutes, a month of receipts takes days: in a worked example with 400 receipts, that is 20 hours at 3 minutes and just over 33 hours at 5 minutes per receipt.
- The faulty receipts are the expensive ones. Missing documents, wrong accounts and wrong VAT codes cost queries and corrections that no per-minute estimate includes.
- Under Art. 958f CO, records and receipts may be kept electronically if they correspond to the transaction and can be made readable at any time. For rewritable storage such as the cloud, the GeBüV requires proof of integrity, a time stamp and logs.
- An agent reads the receipt, proposes the booking and VAT code, and flags what is missing. A person approves before anything is booked.
- To find your own cost per booking, count one month of receipts and time 20 of them.
What ends up in the shoebox
The shoebox is rarely a box. It is an envelope of till receipts, an email with seven attachments, a folder of phone photos and a card statement with half the receipts missing. Fiduciary firms receive the pile from their clients; owners of small businesses collect it themselves until someone has time at the end of the month.
Every receipt goes through the same steps: read it, identify supplier and date, separate amount and VAT, choose the account, set the VAT code, enter it, file it. With a clean receipt, that is routine. The others are what cost money.
- Incomplete: the card payment is there, the invoice is not. Or the photo shows the amount but not the supplier.
- Wrong account: the client coded it in advance, and the business lunch sits under office supplies.
- Wrong VAT code: an invoice showing Swiss VAT was entered without input tax, or a service from a foreign provider was booked like a domestic invoice.
- Duplicate: the same receipt arrives on paper and by email, and both end up in the books.
Each of these costs more than the entry itself: a query to the client, a correcting entry, at worst a corrected VAT return. Those minutes appear in no estimate, because they are scattered across the month.
Worked example: one month of receipts, at 3 and at 5 minutes
What follows is a worked example, calculated and not measured. Its round assumptions are 400 receipts a month, all entered by hand, at a rate of CHF 120.- an hour. Put in your own figures wherever they differ. The calculation follows the logic of the Shoebox Calculator: receipts times minutes per booking, divided by 60, and until someone has measured, once with 3 and once with 5 minutes.
| Worked example: 400 receipts, CHF 120.- an hour | 3 minutes per receipt | 5 minutes per receipt |
|---|---|---|
| Hours per month | 20 | 33.3 |
| Hours per year | 240 | 400 |
| Cost per booking | CHF 6.- | CHF 10.- |
| Cost per month | CHF 2'400.- | CHF 4'000.- |
| Cost per year | CHF 28'800.- | CHF 48'000.- |
Queries, corrections and duplicates are not included. If, in the same example, one receipt in ten triggers a 10-minute query, that adds almost 7 hours a month. The gap between 3 and 5 minutes comes to 160 hours a year, roughly a working month. That is why it pays to measure your own figure rather than trust either of the two.
For a fiduciary firm, this time is either fees on the client's invoice or work that disappears into a flat fee. For a small business, it is internal time, often of the same person who also writes quotes and runs payroll.
Scanning receipts and destroying the paper: what the federal portal says
Whether paper may go after scanning is answered by the federal SME portal through the conditions for electronic retention. Under Art. 958f CO, accounting records and vouchers must be kept for ten years from the end of the financial year. They may be kept on paper, electronically or in a comparable way, provided they correspond to the underlying transactions and can be made readable again at any time.
How electronic storage must work is set out in the ordinance on accounting records (GeBüV). Non-rewritable media are permitted without additional requirements. According to the portal, cloud storage does not count as non-rewritable. For rewritable media, the GeBüV requires a technical procedure that ensures integrity, such as an electronic signature; tamper-proof evidence of when data was stored, such as a time stamp; and retention of logs and log files. Until the period ends, an authorised person must be able to inspect and check the records within a reasonable time.
The portal names one exception explicitly: a printed and signed copy of the annual report and of the audit report must be kept.
For receipts that an agent reads, this means the original is filed unchanged on arrival, before anything is read from it. What the agent produces is a proposal and does not replace the receipt. How to record the path from receipt to entry so that it stays traceable for ten years is covered in the article on the replay log and record keeping.
What an agent prepares, and what a person decides
An agent takes receipts as they arrive today: scan, email attachment, photo. It reads supplier, date, amount, VAT amount and VAT number, and checks them against your chart of accounts, against earlier bookings from the same supplier and against the card statement. Nothing is booked before approval.
| Receipt | What the agent proposes or flags | What the person decides |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier invoice, complete | Account, VAT code and amount, checked against recent bookings from the same supplier | Accept or change |
| Till receipt without a VAT number | Flags the missing detail and proposes the booking with a note on input tax | Ask the client, or decide how to book it |
| Card payment without a receipt | Flags the receipt as missing and drafts the request to the client | Approve the request |
| Coded in advance by the client | Compares with the chart of accounts and the previous year, and flags each difference with its source | Keep or correct the client's coding |
| Invoice from a foreign provider | Flags a possible case of acquisition tax (reverse charge) | Decide the VAT treatment |
| Same receipt twice | Flags a possible duplicate and shows both sources | Discard one of them |
The agent corrects nothing silently, not even a client's coding, and it does not file a VAT return. The person approving sees receipt and proposal side by side and decides receipt by receipt. Their time moves from typing to checking the cases the agent has flagged.
Many accounting programs already read receipts and propose bookings themselves. An agent does not replace that function. It checks what is proposed there against your rules and the client's history before anyone clicks accept. What that looks like on top of existing software is described in the article on a review layer over Bexio and Abacus.
Annual VAT returns: fewer deadlines, a bigger shoebox
Since 1 January 2025, businesses with annual turnover of up to CHF 5'005'000.- can apply to settle VAT once a year (ESTV). According to the ESTV's German-language page, they pay instalments during the year, and the annual return must be filed and paid by the end of February of the following year. The declaration itself does not change.
For receipts, this has a side effect. A business that settles only once a year is tempted to book only once a year. Then a whole year's shoebox lands on the desk in January, and a wrong VAT code from March only surfaces eleven months later, when the client no longer remembers the receipt. Having receipts read and checked continuously while filing once a year: the two fit together well.
How to measure your own cost per booking
The worked example does not replace a measurement. You get your own figure in one month, with a stopwatch and no new software.
- 01CountTake the last closed month and count every receipt entered by hand: till receipts, supplier invoices, lines from card statements. Anything that arrives through an interface does not count.
- 02TimeHave someone enter 20 receipts as usual and time it, from reaching into the box to the saved entry. The total divided by 20 gives your minutes per receipt.
- 03Count the errorsIn the same month, count the queries to clients, the correcting entries and the duplicates. Estimate the minutes for each.
- 04CalculateReceipts times minutes, divided by 60, plus the error minutes. Multiplied by your rate, that gives the monthly amount; divided by the number of receipts, the cost per booking.
- 05Cross-check with approvalHave an agent propose bookings for the same month, then time the person who approves them. Only the comparison of both figures shows whether an agent pays off.
For the first four steps, the worksheet is in the Shoebox Calculator. Step five is the start of a pilot: measure first, then build an agent with approval and a log, then measure again. How that works at Grow Amplified is described under Approach.
Frequently asked questions
May I destroy paper receipts after scanning them?
The Code of Obligations allows electronic retention if receipts correspond to the transaction and can be made readable at any time, and the GeBüV sets conditions for the storage. The annual report and the audit report must be kept as printed and signed copies. Whether your storage meets the conditions is a question for your auditor or legal adviser, before you destroy any paper.
Is a phone photo good enough as a receipt?
Under Art. 958f CO, what matters is that the receipt corresponds to the transaction and can be made readable at any time. A sharp photo showing supplier, date, amount and VAT in full meets that more readily than a crooked picture with a cut-off edge. The same storage conditions apply as for any scan.
How long does entering one receipt take?
It depends on the receipt and the office, which is why measuring 20 receipts is worth it. Without a measurement, the Shoebox Calculator works once with 3 and once with 5 minutes per booking. Queries and corrections come on top.
Does the agent post the entries itself?
No. It reads, proposes the account and VAT code, and flags what is missing or different. Nothing is booked until a person has approved it, and every step is logged.
What does the annual VAT return change for work with receipts?
The number of returns falls; the number of receipts does not. If receipts are still checked continuously, a wrong VAT code is found in the same month rather than at the annual return. Whether annual settlement suits you is a question for your fiduciary or the ESTV.
Do I need new accounting software for this?
Usually not. The agent works with the receipts and exports you already have and proposes bookings for the program you already use.
15 years in banking and consulting, in transformation and finance operations. Today he builds review lanes with Grow Amplified: agents read and reconcile, a person approves, and a replay log records who decided what.