Swiss accounting software, offline and without a subscription

What the books of a Swiss SME or freelancer need

A spreadsheet works for a while, but Swiss obligations catch up quickly. Whether you run a sole proprietorship or a small company, accounting software for Switzerland has to cover a handful of non-negotiables. These are the ones that matter when the year closes or the tax office asks.

Double-entry bookkeeping on a Swiss chart of accounts

Above the income threshold set by the Code of Obligations you are required to keep double-entry books. The software should ship with a Swiss SME chart of accounts (the familiar KMU / PMI structure) already loaded, so every entry lands in the right account from day one instead of being rebuilt by hand.

Balance sheet and income statement

At year-end you need a clean balance sheet and income statement straight from the same data — not a manual reassembly. Good software produces both as PDFs you can hand to an accountant or attach to a tax filing without reformatting anything.

FTA VAT, the way Switzerland charges it

If you are registered for VAT, the software has to handle the current Swiss rates and let more than one rate sit on a single invoice. It should support both the effective method and the net tax rate (saldo) method, since smaller businesses frequently use the latter to simplify their FTA returns.

Bank reconciliation from camt.053

Swiss banks export account statements in the ISO 20022 camt.053 format. Software that reads those files lets you match payments against open invoices automatically, instead of ticking off transactions line by line in e-banking.

Ten-year archiving

Swiss law requires you to keep your books and supporting documents for ten years. That argues for software where your records live somewhere durable and under your control, not locked inside an account you might lose access to.

Vidima: bookkeeping and invoicing in one offline suite

Vidima is Swiss accounting software built by Helvecraft for exactly these requirements. It is a suite, not a single-purpose tool: it keeps your double-entry books and issues your QR-bill invoices in the same program. Revenue you bill posts straight into the journal, so you are not copying figures between a separate invoicer and a separate ledger.

• Double-entry accounting: a preloaded Swiss SME chart of accounts, journal, balance sheet and income statement exportable to PDF — included in the licence, with no extra module to buy.
• FTA VAT: all current Swiss rates, effective or net tax rate (saldo) method, several rates on a single invoice.
• Bank reconciliation: import camt.053 statements and match incoming payments against your open invoices.
• QR-bill invoicing: Swiss QR codes following the SIX standard, validated before every PDF export. You can try one for free in the QR-bill generator, and read the full picture on the Swiss invoicing software page.
• Guided import from Bexio and Banana: bring your existing accounts and history across instead of starting from zero. See the detail on Vidima as a Bexio alternative and Vidima as a Banana alternative.
• Public-sector mode (MCA2): for cantonal and municipal bodies, Vidima also keeps books under the harmonised MCA2 / HRM2 accounting model.

And it stays out of the cloud. Vidima is a native desktop app for Windows and macOS that runs 100% offline. There is no account and no server: your client list, your revenue and your ledger sit on your own machine, which makes the ten-year retention question simple to answer. You pay once and the software is yours — no monthly fee to keep your own books open.

Accounting software shouldn't ask you to rent access to your own ledger every month, or to keep ten years of records on someone else's servers.

Price and free trial

Vidima is a one-time purchase, not a subscription. It starts at CHF 149 for the Personal licence, with Pro and Studio tiers above it — each paid once, with updates within version v1.x included. There is no recurring fee and no per-seat surprise: a CHF 25-a-month subscription is CHF 900 over three years and keeps running; Vidima Personal is CHF 149, once.

You can try the full app free for 30 days, with no credit card, and decide afterwards. Vidima is available from vidima.ch and the Microsoft Store.

Common questions