Swiss Books (Internal)

This one was born out of pure frustration. I tried a stack of tools and went through a few accountants, and none of it worked. The tools were opaque — and I knew nothing about accounting, so half the time I couldn't even tell what I was looking at. The accountants cost a fortune and a serious amount of my own time, and still never quite seemed to get the business.

Because short-term rental is genuinely a nightmare to account for, and ours — by some stroke of bad luck — is absurdly complex for such a small business: a flood of transactions, down-payments and payouts, tourist taxes, split payment providers, channel commissions, several currencies, two VAT rates, an intercompany relationship with the property company. A tiny operation with the accounting surface area of a much bigger one.

At some point I thought, how hard can it be. It's hard. Every layer I opened had another one underneath it. What was meant to be a small tool to hand the accountant clean numbers kept going deeper and deeper until, somewhere along the way, it had quietly become the whole thing — not preparation for the books, but the books.

Underneath it's a proper double-entry ledger on a Swiss KMU chart of accounts — profit & loss, balance sheet, trial balance, a fixed-asset schedule (Anlagespiegel), period closing. And it produces the full output: PDF statements, CSV exports, and the Swiss quarterly MWST return rendered straight onto the official ESTV form, so filing is a read rather than a reconstruction. Receipts are the biggest time-saver — one arrives in any currency, gets read, converted to CHF at the day's rate, classified, booked, and matched to its bank transaction, with checks that have to pass before it counts as clean. Bookings sync in from the channel manager already split into accommodation revenue, tourist tax and VAT.

It's multi-tenant by design — I now keep more than one of my companies on it — and queryable as a system rather than a closed app (this very page was written by reading the live chart of accounts). It isn't open for signups, and turning it into something other people could use would be a real project rather than a flip of a switch — a someday-maybe, not a plan.

I didn't set out to build an accounting platform. It's just what pure frustration and 'how hard can it be' eventually produce. But it's the thing I'm quietly proudest of: a complete, Swiss-compliant system that real businesses actually close their quarters on — built and run by one person.