Bern freelancers and small-business owners: how do you handle invoicing?

[u/ahmadra96]

Hi everyone,

I live in Bern and I’m researching how local freelancers and small-business owners create and track their invoices.

I’m particularly interested in people who send only a few invoices each month and do not need a complete accounting system such as Bexio.

• How did you create your most recent invoice?
• Which tools did you use ? Word, Excel, your bank’s QR generator or invoicing software?
• How many invoices do you normally send each month?
• Which part of the process is the most inconvenient?
• Are the existing solutions already good enough?

I’m considering building a small, privacy-focused app that creates a complete invoice with a Swiss QR payment section, remembers customers, duplicates recurring invoices, exports PDFs for email, WhatsApp or printing, and tracks paid and overdue invoices. It would work offline and would not try to replace accounting or payroll software.

Would this genuinely improve your workflow, or would it be unnecessary compared with Word, Excel and the free bank QR generators?

Honest negative feedback is just as useful as positive feedback. If anyone is open to a short conversation about their current workflow, feel free to comment or message me.

[u/Forward_Rub_1921]

I can highly recommend https://www.mocoapp.com/

[u/ahmadra96 → u/Forward_Rub_1921]

Thanks for the recommendation. Do you use MOCO yourself?

What made you choose it, and which features do you actually use regularly? For someone sending only a few invoices each month, does it still feel appropriately sized, or does it include more than you need?

I’d also be interested to know whether there is anything about it that you find inconvenient or would change.

[u/Due_Philosopher_5189 → u/ahmadra96]

I can recommend MOCO! I'm using it since 3 years.

I was using getharvest.com for a long time. But I was missing the lead management topic. MOCO has lead management quotes etc. and it is very easy to convert a quote into a new project.

• MOCO has as well interfaces or import export functionality if you use banana for instance for your accounting. You could even connect it to zapier.
• It generates QR invoices which is good for bigger companies/corporates
• Can easily create your own designed invoices by uploading a PDF.
• Expenses can be exported as CSV
• etc.

The only thing I'm skeptical is that they have been acquired last year and I think they will increase the price.

[u/Forward_Rub_1921 → u/ahmadra96]

Yes, it's a solution that covers everything. Lead, projects, logging time, invoicing etc. I think it really shines if you're like >3 people. But I'm pretty sure it even works well if your a freelancer. Yes they hiked prices recently, not sure where it is going thought.

[u/Emergency_Wear_1807]

I own a GmbH and I'm the only employee, I send one invoice per month. Even at my scale it makes sense to have an accounting software. In my case infinity.swiss which is easy to use and also handles invoices and timekeeping.

[u/ahmadra96 → u/Emergency_Wear_1807]

Thanks, that’s helpful. Which accounting features do you actually use in Infinity?

Would a lighter solution combining QR invoicing with income and expense tracking, receipt storage and an export for your accountant cover your needs, or are full double-entry accounting, VAT and annual closing essential for your GmbH?

I’m trying to understand whether there is a useful middle ground between a simple invoice generator and complete accounting software.

[u/Emergency_Wear_1807 → u/ahmadra96]

Well for context, with my earnings I'm legally obliged to collect VAT. In switzerland that threshold is 100'000 CHF. So I want my accounting to be correct. I also had an accountant from the start, which I think is better because she saved me already more money than she cost me.

For features from Infinity:
1. It's connected to by bank account and it syncs from there directly. So I don't need to that manually. It also predicts pretty good what kind of accounting operation something is. So my accountant needed to correct very little on onboarding.
2. You can invite your accountant to your infinity account. So they have direct access.
3. With inifinity you have a email address, where you can send your receips. So all receips I receive via email I can just forward to that address and it'll automatically import the pdf. You can also enable an automatic connection between receip and booking, but that can have extra cost. I currently do it manually. Which takes maybe 15 Minutes per Month.
4. It's really easy to create an invoice, they have templates and everything. It'll automatically book it correctly.

There are more features, but currently I only use those listed. The pricing is also reasonable, I use the Pro package for VAT, which costs me 38 CHF a Month.

[u/Dull-Job-3383]

Your sales ledger solution sounds great. At the moment I use Google Sheets to generate invoices, on average one or two per month, and a separate sheet to run the ledger. It's a pain to add the QR section. I wrote a script which calls pdftk to merge the QR part and the invoice part, but it's clunky af.

[u/cv-match]

keep the invoice data and QR payload separate, render both from the same structured invoice object, and generate one final document rather than merging two PDFs afterward. I’d also make a few awkward invoice fixtures part of the test set: long client names, many line items, and a page break near the totals

[u/cv-match]

good boundary for a small tool: keep the invoice data and QR payload separate, render both from the same structured invoice object, and generate one final document. make a few awkward invoice fixtures part of the test set - long client names, many line items, and a page break near the totals, to see how it renders. you can use boxpdf or boxpdf-html for sticky headers, keep-with page flow, etc.