It's reasonably popular - what is your connection with Switzerland?

I have no connection to Switzerland. I just got a download link of Banana Accounting from orkut and found it quite satisfying the accouting needs. The person who gave the link referred this to be an application being used at Switzerland.I just wanted to confirm that.

I am starting a small consulting business (http://www.swissresults.com) and I want software to help take care of the bookkeeping and bill payments. My German is not good enough to use any of the other software packages. Cashcomm is the only one I have found which has an English option. I have been setting up my company and working with the folks at softcrew with great success. After some initial startup problems, it looks like it is starting to go in the right direction.

If you come from the States and you are used to using Quicken, then it will take a little time to use Cashcomm (or just about any other bookkeeping sw), but in the long run, you will have many of the features you want.

Quicken is not double-entry bookkeeping, most everything else you try is.

There were complication getting cashcomm to work with CreditSuisse. I use it with both CS (for business) and UBS (for personal accounts). Getting all the right options for CS working was a little painful. Basically there are some options ON THE Credit Suisse site which you need to enable AFTER you have a DIRECTNET account which you must enable AND THEN WAIT 2 DAYS, before CashComm will work for you. And then, it will only be able to download bank transactions which happen AFTER the day you make the change in Directnet.

Getting CashComm to work with UBS was much easier. The nice thing is UBS can download historic transactions into cashcomm.

Both UBS and CS like CashComm. For instance, CS has a special phone number for DirectNet users who are using CashComm.

But like I said, the people at SoftCrew were very helpful. Their software includes a nice feature where you can allow them to connect to your computer and help you live one-on-one.

If you have a problem with a translation, send it to them and they will fix it.

You need to understand, the people at Intuit/Quicken have it easy because they have strong-armed all the banks into one system for transfering data. In Switzerland, there are many different protocols used by the banks, and CashComm needs to work out the details with each one.

My advice to SoftCrew is to focus on writing English documentation only for those banks which also offer English services on their web sites which as far as I know are UBS and CS.

Generally, my impression is I like the software and will purchase it after the 1 year trial period is up.

Sam

For those of you who speak German and need a small software for your business I can strongly recommend Buspro

www.buspro.ch

We've been using up till now and it has worked great. Now we are upgrading to Abacus and the only reason being we need Cost Center accounting. Otherwise I would have stayed with Buspro.

For Payroll I've been using Datawin's "Lohn" which also wasn't bad (and cheap). Also there we will be using Abacus now though.

I have been using Winware Fibu for some time, and it works out ok -- I have good support. However, though I speak German, it is slow going to understand and remember the accounting words (since I don't know accounting). If I could learn these words in English it would help. I seek a guide in the greater Zurich area who knows Winware and who can give me an hour or so a month of translation help.

Absolutely correct it deals with all Swiss accounting issues including those that are only found in more expensive software such as cost centres, credit customers and the like. And all for a one off CHF 129. Okay if you want to keep getting the updates you need to pay some maintenance but for my needs, which are quite complicated, it works absolutely perfectly and on top of that is used by many treuhänder...

Hi Grumpy, and if you have any problems with it you can drop me a line and I will let you know how to do things.

Richard
PS dont forget you can do all your accounting in English and convert to German at the last minute so to speak to make life easier for your bookkeepers if you have any that is...

I've been using Excel (well Google Spreadsheets) and GnuCash to consolidate and categorize my transactions. I agree that Excel is highly flexible and lets you do what you want to do, and I like and use it for the same reason. However I am still looking for a software solution that saves me the couple of hours of manual work I need to do every month categorizing my transactions. I'm looking for something like mint.com (for the US). Probably such software can also advise me on managing my cash/money/expenses properly.

Since this thread is very old and technology has changed, I would like to raise this issue once more:

I am now looking to separate a small business from a large company that uses SAP, that means looking for a smaller & cheaper Swiss accounting package with some functionalities out of the box.

I require an accounting package that can communicate with other systems via a built-in API or some kind of connection.

I am also looking into something that can match payments with debtors and deal with banking transactions in some kind of automated way.

Any suggestions for something like this?

Accounting software in Switzerland has not changed much, most applications are still Microsoft Windows-centric, fugly looking and rather expensive …

Martin

I am looking for a rather similar software, did you find any?
any recommendations?

thanks

I used Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) when I worked for a small start up in London and found it to be extremely versatile and user friendly.

I am currently looking into this for my work. Don't know much about it yet. There is also a cheaper version that should be good enough for personal use.


http://www.clx-shop.com/ubs/en/Finan...nessMaker.html

How come there is still no simple and user-friendly financial software for private use (maybe I am too used to iphone-like device!) that works with Credit Suisee and Postfinance? Please lemme know if there is any (of course in English). Thanks for any new info.

I've been using Quickbooks Pro for 7 years because it's cheap, easy to use, manages my inventory and can handle multiple currencies.
Disadvantage: Does not work with PostFinance, Credit Suisse, or any other Swiss banking systems so I have to do all payments manually.

I'm looking for a Swiss equivalent but have not found anything affordable or easy to use.