booking salary and payroll expenses into company chart of accounts

Finance, Taxes, Banking, Insurance and Retirement
1
I've looked at th e Sch weizer Kontenrahmen KMU (chart of accounts for SME)

It has various expense accounts for payroll:

5 Personalaufwand

5000 Lohnaufwand (salary)

5700 Sozialversicherungsau f wand (social security)

5800 Übriger Personalaufwand (other personnel costs)

5900 Leistungen Dritter (Zahlung en

an Pe rsonalvermittlung für

Temporärkräfte) (third party services)

Does anybody know how to use these accounts in more detail?

For example, I have an AHV/AVS bill for January 2022. I paid it in December 2021. Is it offset against my profit for the 2021 taxes or the 2022 taxes?

Is it useful to create a different subaccount on a per-year or per-employee basis? Or I can just book them all into the same account code?

2
The more payroll accounts the merrier. These are some of the common payroll accounts that might be considered, as needed:

5000 Monatslohn

5007 Bonuszahlung

5700 AHV-Beitrag

5701 ALV-Beitrag

5720 BVG-Beitrag

5730 NBUV-Beitrag

5740 KTG-Abzug

5790 Quellensteuerabzug

There are others too.

If an invoice is paid in a period before the cost applies, it should be booked to prepaid expenses and then expensed in the next period, or when the cost applies.

Tip: consider using a Swiss payroll software, e.g., Easysalary. It will save time and headaches.

Good luck!

3

Thanks for those

Thanks for this. From a tax perspective, it is deductible in 2021 if it was paid in 2021? To put it differently, if somebody has a surplus at the end of a year, should they pay their AHV for the next quarter or should they use the money on other expenses?

Right now it is a single employee with a fixed salary. There are quarterly invoices for AHV/AVS and annual invoices for accident and other things, maybe 6 or 7 invoices total, so I didn't want to make the effort to setup more software

4
It should always be on a proper accruals basis - it is booked to the period to which it belongs, for business accounting date of payment is wholly irrelevant.

So if the January bill relates to salary payments in December you accrue it into your 2021 expenses (and show the December payment as a prepayment). If it relates to the January 2022 payroll it belongs in 2022. Regardless of when paid.

5
It appears that you are running a consulting business which is possibly asset light. Two possible tax optimization suggestions might be:

1. Set up a bad debt provision based on open customer invoices at year-end.

2. Accrue for expenses incurred in or for 2021 such as not-yet-received supplier invoices, tax accountant expenses, etc.

More ideas are at this link but they may not apply to an asset-light consulting business:

https://leanrun.com/10-massnahmen-zu...rtups-und-kmu/

6

I looked at some of the bills. The bills for UVG and KTG are like this:

Invoice date: 12.10.2021

Deadline: 01.01.2022

Insurance for period: 01.01.2022 - 31.03.2022

Date of payment: (week before Christmas)

If somebody pays a bill like that in the middle of January they will probably not have any late penalties. Nonetheless, if the invoice date was in 2021, it accrues in 2021? Therefore, it against the 2021 taxable profit?

From a management perspective, I would be more interested in looking at payroll costs for the period they relate to.

7
Oh yes, there will be late payment penalties with these payments. Check the invoice?