Why August Is the Right Time to Start Your 2026 Year-End Close Most Swiss SMEs treat the year-end financial close as a January problem. That is a costly mistake. By the time January arrives, accruals are messy, documents are missing, and your fiduciary or CFO is working under pressure. The businesses that close cleanly – […]
What Changed: The Retroactive Pillar 3a Buy-In Rule On 6 November 2024, the Federal Council adopted an amendment to Art. 7a BVV3, introducing the legal basis for retroactive Pillar 3a contributions – also known as nachträglicher Einkauf. The new rule entered into force on 1 January 2025. Before this amendment, any year in which you […]
Ambitious Swiss SMEs rarely stall because they lack vision. They stall because their numbers cannot keep pace with it. A budget built in January does not reflect what February revealed. By the second quarter, decisions are being made on data that no longer describes the business, and ambition begins to outpace clarity. The companies that […]
From 1 January 2026, the default interest rate the Swiss Confederation charges on overdue federal taxes falls from 4.5% to 4.0%. The reimbursement rate the state pays you on overpaid amounts drops in step, and one quieter change removes an old cash-management trick entirely. For a Swiss SME, the headline looks like good news. The […]
In 2026, the annual VAT reporting option reaches its first real test: SMEs that opted in for the 2025 tax year must file their first annual return, and settle any balance, by the end of February 2026. Annual reporting, available since 1 January 2025, lets qualifying businesses file VAT once a year instead of four […]
A CHF 100’000 salary does not cost your business CHF 100’000. On top of the gross wage, a Swiss employer pays a stack of mandatory social contributions: old-age and disability insurance, unemployment insurance, family allowances, accident cover and the occupational pension. Together these typically add somewhere between 12% and 20% to the gross salary, depending […]
Swiss corporate insolvencies are running at record levels in 2026, and a significant part of the reason is a change to debt enforcement law that took effect on 1 January 2025. Since then, falling behind on your VAT, taxes or social security contributions is no longer just an enforcement inconvenience: for a company entered in […]
Every business has numbers. Not every business knows what they are trying to say. Revenue, margins, payroll, cash flow, customer acquisition, project delivery: on their own, these are just metrics. The value appears only when you understand how they influence one another, and that connection is what separates a set of reports from a financial […]
Many innovative Swiss SMEs pay more cantonal tax than they need to, because they assume the patent box and the research and development super-deduction are instruments for large corporations. They are not. Both were built into ordinary cantonal tax law by the 2020 tax reform, and a MedTech, hardware, software or manufacturing SME with genuine […]
Most Swiss SMEs treat electronic invoicing as optional, and domestically it still is. But from 1 September 2026 France requires structured B2B e-invoicing, Germany follows from 2027, and the practical effect reaches every Swiss company that sells into the EU: your customers there will start refusing PDF invoices. E-invoicing has quietly moved from a nice-to-have […]