Digital accounting? - Swiss SMEs are far from it
A joint survey by the two companies Run my Accounts and GRYPS shows the state of accounting in Swiss SMEs. The result: accounting is neither digital nor an essential management tool there.
Accounting in Swiss SMEs cannot be described as "digital", as the results of a survey by Run my Accounts and the offer portal GRYPS show. The survey took place between June 25 and July 8, 2020; 109 SMEs participated online.
Digital accounting still far from standard
One of the most important findings up front: paper receipts are still the standard. Online accounting programs are also not the norm in the SME landscape. The advantages of digital accounting, such as low costs and up-to-date and meaningful books, are not yet recognized by Swiss SMEs.
On a scale of 0-4, Swiss SMEs rate themselves at only a 2.8 when it comes to using accounting for business decisions (e.g. hiring new employees, deciding on investments). Small SMEs in particular do not use the strategic potential of the books; a glance at the bank account often has to suffice. If SMEs define important business processes without looking at the accounting, this directly increases the risk of bankruptcy.
Accounting: Preferably inexpensive - and led by the managing director
An accounting solution must first and foremost be cheap for Swiss SMEs: SMEs cite "low costs" as the most important factor. Quality and legal compliance are only mentioned in second place. It is therefore not surprising that Swiss SMEs rate the quality of their own accounting as mediocre: On a scale of 1-5, the companies give themselves only a 3.3 for the quality of their own accounting.
Do SME business managers prefer to deal with accounting than with their customers? This does indeed seem to be the case. In 47% of the SMEs surveyed, the managing director personally handles the financial accounting. An external fiduciary professional takes over accounting in only 19% of the SMEs surveyed.
Other results in the survey
More than half of the respondents (55%) estimate that the proportion of paper documents in their SME is still at least 60%. This means that digital documents have not yet arrived in Swiss SMEs. Furthermore, 60% of the companies surveyed still do their accounting on locally installed software. Small SMEs with up to 10 employees and large SMEs with 51 employees or more also prefer to do their accounting internally. Outsourcing is more common among medium-sized SMEs. Only when accounting becomes increasingly complex and formalistic are fiduciary experts called in, e.g. for value added tax (33%), annual financial statements (42%) or taxes (45%).
Conclusion: Swiss SMEs have yet to realize the benefits of digital accounting. Instead of bookkeeping, they use the SME bank account to make business decisions. In contrast to bookkeeping, this is not meaningful enough: Only clean bookkeeping recognizes and avoids liquidity bottlenecks and bankruptcies in the long term.
Source: www.gryps.ch and www.runmyaccounts.ch
