Automating bexio:invoices and payments without manual entry.

What bexio already automates

bexio is one of the most widely used business software solutions for Swiss SMEs. According to an announcement from February 2026, more than 100,000 companies use it; bexio is wholly owned by Swiss insurer Die Mobiliar.^[1] For payments, bexio lists more than 60 bank connections. Incoming payments are automatically matched with open invoices, and payment orders for supplier invoices go straight to e-banking.^[2]

Receipts can be photographed and uploaded with the bexio Go app. bexio itself describes this as digital filing rather than a certified archive; the company has to document its digitisation procedure. bexio does not describe automatic text recognition of receipts on that page.^[3] This is exactly where many automations come in: receipts are read, supplier, amount, date and VAT are recognised and prepared as a suggestion.

The typical route from shop to accounting

In online retail, most bookings do not start in bexio but in the shop. A complete process usually includes these steps:

1. Order in the shop, for example in Shopify or WooCommerce.
2. Contact found or created in bexio, with a properly structured address.
3. Invoice created with items, quantities and the correct VAT rate.
4. Payment recorded, either via the QR reference in the bank import or via the payment provider’s payout.
5. Reconciliation and fees booked, including refunds and foreign currencies.

Ready-made connectors exist for individual steps. The bexio Marketplace, for example, lists a WooCommerce connector by Helvy that transfers orders and customer data; the same provider offers a solution for Shopify.^{[5, 6]} If you have several payment methods, marketplaces or special cases, standard connectors often reach their limits.

What the bexio API can do

The bexio API is a REST interface with the base URL api.bexio.com/2.0, with some endpoints running under version 3.0. Authentication uses OAuth 2.0 with OpenID Connect or a personal access token that is valid for 60 days and grants full access to company data.^[4]

Source: bexio API documentation, retrieved in September 2026.^[4]

In practice, this means events such as new orders come from the shop, and bexio is queried at sensible intervals. A robust automation respects the rate limit, retries requests after errors and logs every booking. For production systems, OAuth is preferable to a personal access token, because the token expires after 60 days and cannot be restricted.

QR-bill: the November 2026 deadline

The QR-bill was introduced from 30 June 2020, and the red and orange payment slips were discontinued on 30 September 2022.^[7] Since 22 November 2025, newly created QR codes may only contain structured addresses, meaning street, house number, postcode and town in separate fields.^[8]

A transition period for payments runs until the SIC release of 20 November 2026. Payments with unstructured addresses and an execution date after that are rejected by the banks.^[9] For online shops, this is a practical issue: if the shop stores addresses as free text, they must be split properly before being passed to bexio. Otherwise, QR-bills or payments will be faulty.

Booking payment providers correctly

With card payments, the difficulty lies in the details. In Switzerland, Stripe charges 2.9 % plus CHF 0.30 per transaction for Swiss cards; for international cards it is 3.25 % plus CHF 0.30, with an additional 2 % for currency conversion.^[16] The net amount is paid out, but revenue and fees must be booked separately.

In practice, a clearing account for the payment provider and a separate fee account are used for this. Refunds need their own entries, and foreign currencies add effort.^[17] On top of that come the correct VAT rates: since 2024, 8.1 % standard rate, 2.6 % reduced rate and 3.8 % for accommodation.^[15] An automation can split payouts into their components and match each order to its payment.

Retention and digital receipts

Under Art. 958f of the Swiss Code of Obligations, accounting records and vouchers must be kept for ten years from the end of the financial year. The Ordinance on Accounting Records (GeBüV) also permits modifiable storage media if integrity is protected, for example with signatures, timestamps and logs. The data must be readable at all times.^{[10, 11]}

For automated processes, this means every receipt should be linked to its booking, stored unchanged and logged in a traceable way.

Why it pays off

In SECO’s 2022 bureaucracy monitor, 60 % of companies surveyed described their administrative burden as high or rather high.^[13] An older Billentis study for the Austrian Economic Chamber estimated the cost of a paper invoice at around EUR 13 and 13 minutes of processing.^[12] The figure is old and cannot be applied directly to Switzerland, but it shows how much time individual receipts take.

Payments are also shifting: eBill had more than 4 million users at the end of June 2026, and around 93 million transactions ran through it in 2025. LSV+ and BDD will be discontinued on 30 September 2028 and replaced by eBill Direct Debit.^[14]

Checklist for your bexio automation

• Which receipts come from the shop, and which arrive by email or post?
• Are addresses stored in a structured way so that QR-bills and payments work after November 2026?
• How are payouts from Stripe, TWINT or PayPal split into revenue, fees and refunds?
• Are VAT rates stored correctly for each item?
• Is every automatic booking logged, and is there a place where exceptions are reviewed?
• Is API authentication handled via OAuth, and is the rate limit respected?

Frequently asked questions