Payroll in Bilanzi
Bilanzi calculates your employees’ wages, produces the payslips and prepares the entry for your books. Payroll is part of the Free plan. This page shows how you set it up and what a payroll run does.
What payroll does today
You record your employees, set their wages and do a payroll run each month. The run gives you a payslip for each person and a draft entry for the ledger. The annual wage account shows what was paid out over a year.
- Employments with AHV number, start date and end date
- Monthly pay, hourly pay and on-call work
- Wage types with an account and contribution liability you decide
- Payroll runs with correction runs and payslips as PDF
- Withholding tax by canton and tariff code
- An annual wage account and the salary certificate following Form 11 for each employment
You approve the contribution rates
The employer deducts the AHV contribution, the Swiss old-age insurance, from every wage payment. The employer pays it to the compensation office together with its own share. IV, EO and ALV go through the same office. The rates can change at the start of a year. That is why Bilanzi never calculates with a rate from memory.
The federal rates are listed with their source under For professionals › Legal bases. The owner reads the source and approves the rate. Bilanzi records who read the source. Only then does Bilanzi use it.
What appears on your business’s own invoices goes under Settings › Payroll. That is the administration fee of your compensation office, your accident insurance premiums and the rate of your family allowance fund. Bilanzi does not work out the occupational pension from rates. For each employment you enter the two monthly amounts from your pension fund’s statement. If a rate is missing, Bilanzi calculates no wage and tells you which one is missing.
Your first payroll, step by step
Bilanzi takes you through the steps to your first payroll run. First you enter your business details: canton, compensation office and account number, family allowance fund, accident insurer and policy number, and pension fund. You also pick the accounts in your chart of accounts that wages are posted to.
Then you set up the wage types. The standard catalogue is enough to start: monthly pay, hourly pay, 13th month pay, bonus, overtime, expenses and one deduction. You decide yourself whether a wage type is liable for AHV, ALV, accident insurance, pension or withholding tax, and you record what that decision is based on.
Last, you record the employments: name, date of birth, AHV number, start date, canton of work and country of residence. You record the agreed wage with a date. If it changes, the old wage still applies to the months before.
What a payroll run does
You open the month and add whatever only applies this time, such as a bonus or the hours of a temporary helper. Bilanzi pays hours at the agreed hourly rate. Then you run the calculation. For each employment you see gross pay, deductions, net pay and the employer’s contributions.
When everything is right, you close the run. After that it does not change. You download each person’s payslip as a PDF, in English, German, French or Italian, and archive it in Bilanzi. You fix a mistake with a correction run that replaces the month.
When you close the run, Bilanzi prepares a draft entry. It has one line per account and never shows a single person’s wage. The bookkeeping sees the staff costs, but no individual salary. A person with access to the books then posts the draft.
Withholding tax
For some employees, the employer deducts income tax straight from the wage and pays it to the canton. This applies, for example, to foreign employees without a C permit. Each canton sets its own tariffs.
In Bilanzi you record for each employment whether withholding tax applies, with the canton, the tariff code, the date and the basis for the decision. The owner enters the tariff with its source and approves it. The payroll run deducts the tax, shows it on the payslip and posts it to an account of its own.
Sources: Withholding tax, Federal Tax Administration, page in German (estv.admin.ch)
Reporting and paying out
Payslips and the annual wage account give you the figures for your reports to the compensation office, the accident insurer, the pension fund and the tax office. You report them through each body’s portal. You download the salary certificate as a PDF and give it to your employees.
You pay the wages from your e-banking. The withholding tax you deducted sits on its own account, and you settle it with the tax office of your canton.
Who can see wages
Wages are visible to the owner, the administrators and people with the payroll role. A person who only has access to the books sees no wages.
Archived payslips are kept apart from your other receipts and never go to the AI. The API for your own software cannot change any wage. Payslips are accounting vouchers and are kept for ten years, like all the others.
Anything else on your mind?
Does Bilanzi produce the salary certificate?
Yes. The salary certificate following Form 11 and the 2026 guidance is made from a year’s finalized payroll runs, in whole francs. You choose the figure for each wage type. You download it as a PDF.
Where do the contribution rates come from?
The federal rates are in Bilanzi with their source. The owner checks and approves them. You take the rates of your insurers and funds from their invoices. Without approved rates, Bilanzi calculates no wages.
What does payroll cost?
Nothing. Payroll is part of the Free plan. With Autopilot you can also prepare a payroll run on WhatsApp.
Who can run payroll in Bilanzi?
The owner, the administrators and people with the payroll role. You assign the role when you invite someone. A person who only has access to the books sees no wages.
What it costs
This is part of the Free plan, so it costs nothing, and of every other plan too.
Related topics
Accounting for your GmbH
A Swiss GmbH has to keep full books, however small it is. Here is what the Code of Obligations requires and how you do it with Bilanzi. The core bookkeeping is included in the Free plan.
Accounting for businesses that keep their own books
Many small Swiss businesses keep their own numbers. Bilanzi is Swiss accounting software built for exactly that, and the Free plan costs nothing.
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