Year-end receipts: ready to hand over in three steps

In short: You get year end receipts ready to hand over in three steps: first, gather every receipt of the year in one place and reconcile it against your bank statement; second, close the gaps, check each receipt and categorise it; third, export everything as PDFs plus a list and hand it over. If you have captured receipts through the year this takes one to two hours; with a year's pile it takes a weekend.

For many people, December is the month when the receipt pile suddenly matters. The accountant asks for the documents, the tax return is looming, and somewhere in the glove compartment there is still a fuel receipt from May. The aim of this article is not to sell you a perfect system but to walk you through the handover in three clear steps, however your year has gone.

The steps apply to self-employed people who take their books to an accountant just as much as to employees who need receipts for their tax return. The only difference is the volume.

Step 1: Bring every receipt of the year into one place

The first step is gathering, not sorting. Before you check anything, every receipt has to be in one place, physically or digitally. Sorting while you gather costs double, because you handle each receipt twice.

Go through these places, because that is where receipts hide in practice:

• Wallet, jacket pockets, car, backpack
• Kitchen drawer and the pile next to the printer
• Email inbox: search for "invoice", "receipt", "order", "Rechnung"
• Online accounts: telecom, electricity, insurance, software subscriptions, online shops
• Photos on your phone, in case you snapped receipts along the way
• Credit card and bank statements as a control list

If you have paper receipts, scan them now. With Belego you photograph each receipt; the app crops it, straightens it and saves it as a PDF. Amount, date and merchant are read automatically; anything that cannot be read reliably is left blank for you to fill in by hand. A pile of 100 receipts takes around half an hour this way, and the faded fuel receipts are preserved before they become completely unreadable.

An example: a graphic designer with a sole proprietorship has around 140 expense receipts, 25 customer invoices and twelve bank statements for 2026. After step 1, all 140 receipts are PDFs in the app, the customer invoices are PDFs in a folder called "Invoices 2026", and the bank statements are downloads from the bank. Nothing else has happened yet, but the most important part is done: nothing can get lost any more.

Step 2: Close the gaps, check and categorise

The second step turns the heap into a complete, verified list. Take the bank statement and the credit card statement and go through them entry by entry: is there a receipt for every business expense? If one is missing, note it on a "missing receipts" list.

There is usually a substitute for a missing receipt. Online invoices can be downloaded again from your customer account, merchants issue copies on request, and for card payments the bank statement plus a short note on the purpose is often enough. Which substitutes are accepted is covered in the article on lost receipts. Allow five to ten minutes per missing receipt; with 140 receipts and five gaps that is just under an hour.

Then check every receipt on four points:

1. Readable: Amount, date and merchant are legible. If not, a substitute receipt helps.
2. Extracted correctly: Does the amount in the entry match the receipt? A quick glance per receipt is enough.
3. Categorised: Every receipt has a category that matches your accountant's chart of accounts or the sections of the tax return, for example materials, vehicle, office, training, medical costs.
4. Annotated where needed: A note on receipts whose purpose is not obvious. "Restaurant CHF 86" tells your accountant nothing; "client lunch, Müller project" does.

In Belego you do this directly in the entry: pick a category, type a note, done. The yearly overview then shows totals per category, and you see immediately if a category is empty when it should not be. The article on preparing receipts for your accountant describes which categories accountants typically expect.

Step 3: Export and hand over

The third step is the handover in a format the recipient can process directly. For an accountant that means one PDF per receipt with a meaningful file name plus a list with date, merchant, amount, category and note. For the tax return it means the receipts belonging to the deductions you claim, collected as PDFs.

An export from Belego for the period 1 January to 31 December delivers exactly that: a ZIP with all original PDFs, named by date, merchant and amount, a CSV list with category and note, and a README explaining the structure. The CSV opens in Excel, Banana or CashCtrl, and the PDFs suit bexio and similar programs. Which columns the list contains and how the import works is explained in the article on exporting receipts as CSV.

Before you send the ZIP, open it once and check two things: does the number of PDFs match the number of rows in the CSV, and is the total of the amounts roughly what you expect? A gap of several thousand francs points to duplicated or missing receipts.

Keep a copy of the export yourself. It doubles as your backup and covers the retention obligation, which is ten years for business receipts in Switzerland (Art. 958f OR).

What else belongs in the year-end handover besides receipts?

Receipts alone are not enough for the annual close. Your accountant also needs the framework they fit into. So include:

• Statements for all business accounts as at 31 December
• Credit card statements for the whole year
• All customer invoices issued, and a list of those still unpaid
• Supplier invoices not yet paid at year end
• Inventory or stock count as at 31 December, if relevant
• Logbook or mileage list if you have a business vehicle
• Contracts signed during the year (leasing, rent, insurance)

For a private tax return the list is shorter but similar: salary certificate, bank and securities statements, insurance premiums and the receipts for your deductions. The full list is in the receipt checklist for the Swiss tax return.

How do you avoid the year-end pile next year?

The pile exists because capturing and handing over are a year apart. The fix is not more discipline in December but a shorter gap: scan receipts when you pay and reconcile once a month.

In practice: photograph the receipt at the till, glance at the amount and category, done. At month end, spend ten minutes comparing the bank statement with the app and close any gaps immediately, while the merchant still remembers and the online invoice is still available. In December only step 3 remains, the export, and that takes a minute. The article on the 5-minute receipt routine shows how to build this habit without it fizzling out after two weeks.

Frequently asked questions

When should I start preparing receipts for the annual close?

The first week of January is ideal, as soon as the statements as at 31 December are available. Online invoices are still retrievable, merchants can still supply copies and your accountant still has capacity. If you only start in March you run into full diaries and deadlines. You can do steps 1 and 2 in December already and just add the last few receipts in January.

Do I have to give my accountant paper receipts or scans?

Scans are usually enough, provided they are legible and delivered as individual PDFs. Many accountants prefer digital receipts because they can import them straight into their accounting software. Ask for their preferred format beforehand. Keep the paper originals yourself until the retention period has expired or you have confirmed that the scan is an acceptable substitute.

What do I do with private receipts that have got mixed in with business ones?

Separate them in step 2 with a category of their own called "private" and exclude them from the export, or delete them from the business archive. Your accountant should not waste time sorting out your weekend shopping, and every query costs money. If a receipt is mixed, say office supplies and groceries on one till receipt, note the business share in the comment.

How long does preparing year-end receipts realistically take?

With receipts captured through the year: one to two hours for reconciliation, checking and export. With an unsorted pile of 100 to 150 receipts: allow half a day to a full day, of which scanning is about half an hour and hunting for missing receipts is the largest part. The difference shows why the monthly reconciliation pays off.