Booking your bank statement: bank reconciliation in Switzerland

An invoice is written, sent – and eventually the money arrives. Between those two moments sits a job almost nobody enjoys: going through the bank statement and matching every incoming payment to the right invoice. That is bank reconciliation.

For sole proprietorships and self-employed people it is more than busywork. Without it you do not know which invoices are actually paid – and in the worst case you chase someone who transferred the money weeks ago. This article shows how reconciliation works, which cases get tricky, and what to watch out for with VAT.

What bank reconciliation achieves

Your books know your receivables: for every invoice you issued there is an open item. Your bank account knows reality: it records who transferred how much, and when. Bank reconciliation brings the two together.

When the match is right, three things happen at once: the invoice counts as paid, the journal entry is settled, and your open items shrink by exactly that amount. What remains is what you are genuinely still owed – the basis for any dunning process worth the name.

Where to get your bank statement

For reconciliation you need your bank transactions in a form that can be processed. In Switzerland there are two common routes.

CAMT.053 is the Swiss standard for electronic bank statements. The abbreviation comes from “Cash Management”: it is a structured XML file in which every transaction is properly labelled with date, amount, currency, payment reference and counterparty. Practically every Swiss bank offers it for download in e-banking, usually under “Statements” or “Exports”. Because the data is structured, CAMT.053 is the more reliable format.

The PDF is the statement you get anyway. It is made for human eyes, not for machines – the details sit in a table on the page rather than in clearly named fields. It can still be read by software. That takes a little longer and needs more care, but it works even when your bank offers no CAMT file or you cannot find it.

The difference from a genuine bank connection matters: in file-based reconciliation nobody fetches anything from your bank. You download what you are entitled to see and upload it onwards – no interface, and no software gaining access to your account.

Check before you match

Before you touch the first transaction, the statement itself deserves a check. Four controls always pay off:

• The balance: opening balance plus all transactions must equal the closing balance. If it does not add up, something is missing.
• The totals: the credit and debit totals printed on the statement must agree with the individual transactions.
• Duplicates: processing the same statement twice is the single most common mistake – and it runs through the entire ledger as a phantom payment.
• Gaps: if April is missing between the March and the May statement, you lose a whole month of incoming payments without any error message appearing.

Those last two in particular tend to surface only at year-end when done manually – months later, when nobody remembers what happened.

How a payment finds its invoice

The matching itself is detective work. In practice three clues help, in this order:

1. The invoice number in the payment reference. By far the strongest signal. If the reference reads “INV-2026-0184”, the case is closed.
2. The amount. If it matches an open invoice to the cent, that is a good indication – but not proof, especially with round numbers or recurring flat fees.
3. The payer’s name. Useful when neither amount nor number helps. It gets awkward when someone pays from an account named differently from the billing address.

From this follows a tip that saves you work permanently: make sure your invoice number travels with the payment. A QR payment slip, of the kind Effizo generates automatically during invoicing, already carries the details – your customer scans and has nothing to type. Where people transfer manually, a clear note on the invoice helps: “Please quote the invoice number.”

The cases that rarely divide neatly

If every payment settled exactly one invoice in full, reconciliation would take minutes. Three situations make it harder:

The partial payment. Someone transfers CHF 800 against an invoice for CHF 1,200. The invoice is then neither paid nor unpaid – it is partly settled, and the remaining CHF 400 stays open. Your books have to represent both, otherwise you lose either the payment or the remaining claim.

The lump payment. A customer settles three invoices with a single transfer. One amount therefore has to be split across several open items. Anyone doing this by hand generally recounts twice.

The reminder fee. If you have already sent a reminder, the amount owed exceeds the original invoice. The payment then covers invoice and fee together – and both parts want booking correctly. When a reminder fee is actually owed depends on your terms and conditions; the details are in the article on dunning.

Why the payment date matters for VAT

If you are VAT registered, your accounting method decides when the tax falls due:

• Under agreed consideration, the invoice date counts. The VAT falls into the period in which you issued the invoice – whether or not it has been paid.
• Under payments received, the incoming payment counts. The VAT falls into the period in which the money actually arrived.

For anyone accounting on payments received, bank reconciliation is therefore not a convenience but the foundation of the tax period: it is the match that decides which quarter a turnover belongs to. Reconciliation caught up in January for the whole previous year turns every VAT return into an exercise in reconstruction.

Not every transaction is an entry

Your account carries plenty that has nothing to do with an open invoice: bank charges, card fees, payroll, transfers to your private account, refunds. These transactions need no match – but they do need a decision, otherwise they sit in the worklist forever and you get used to ignoring it.

The sensible approach is to hide them deliberately rather than reassess them on every pass. They vanish from the daily view but stay traceable – and at year-end they remain findable.

How often should you reconcile?

For most sole proprietorships once a month is the right rhythm. It matches the cadence at which banks publish statements, keeps the number of open transactions manageable, and ensures your open items are never more than a few weeks old.

Anyone receiving many small payments is better served by a weekly pass. And anyone accounting for VAT on payments received should be fully reconciled by the end of the quarter at the latest – otherwise the return is wrong.

Conclusion

Bank reconciliation is the point where a receivable becomes turnover. It determines which invoices are genuinely open, when your VAT falls due, and whether your view of your own numbers holds up.

Done by hand it is above all monotonous. With bank reconciliation in Effizo you upload your statement as CAMT.053 or PDF, get matching suggestions for every transaction – and confirm with a click. How much you hand over is up to you: by default you confirm every match, and on request Effizo handles the unambiguous cases itself. Together with simple accounting, what would otherwise sit untouched until year-end stays current.