Made for Swiss self-employed & SMEs
When the letter from the audit office lands on your desk, it is easy to feel your stomach tighten. In Switzerland, most small and medium companies are subject to a limited statutory audit — the «eingeschränkte Revision». It is not a test you can pass with cleverness. It is a checklist that has to be answered, completely and with care.
The good news is that an audit request is mostly a list. The auditor asks for documents — the bookkeeping, the contracts, the minutes of meetings — and for answers to a handful of standard questions. What makes the whole thing stressful is rarely the difficulty. It is the scramble: hunting for files, wondering what is still missing, and replying at the last minute. None of that is necessary.
Here is an AI routine that turns the revision into an ordinary administrative task — exactly the kind of task a machine is good at, so that you can keep the judgement for yourself.
What the auditor actually asks for
Before anything else, it helps to see the request for what it is. A limited statutory audit usually asks for three things: the annual accounts and their supporting documents, the essential contracts and minutes, and written answers to a set of standard confirmations. In plain language: show us the numbers, show us the paperwork, and confirm a few facts. The volume looks frightening only because it arrives as one long letter.
So do not start by reading the whole thing twice and worrying. Start by giving the list a shape. And start early — a week of preparation beats two days of panic, every time.
Step 1: Turn the question list into a checklist
The auditor's letter is often several pages of formal wording. Instead of reading it three times, paste it into your AI tool and ask for a clean table.
Read this audit request and produce a table with one row per request: what is being asked, which document or piece of information answers it, and the due date if one is given. Mark anything that is unclear.
You now have a checklist instead of a wall of text. Read it once, correct anything the AI misunderstood, and you are ready. This single table is the backbone of the whole routine.
Step 2: Match each question to a document
Walk through the table line by line and note where each document lives — a folder, a filename, a binder. Where you are not sure, leave the line open rather than guessing. Then let the AI do the useful part: spotting the gaps.
Here is my checklist. Next to each request I have written the file name or «not sure yet». List every request that still has no document assigned, and every document I mentioned but have not confirmed exists.
This is where the routine pays for itself. Before you dig through the archive, you already know exactly what you still need to find — no more opening every folder in the hope that something turns up.
Step 3: Gather, then draft what is missing
With the gap list in hand, collecting the documents becomes a short, task. For anything you cannot locate, let the AI draft a short note to the auditor — a polite sentence explaining that the item follows separately, or a question asking for clarification. Clear communication in advance is always better than silence at the deadline.
Step 4: Keep an answer log
Many audit questions repeat every year: confirmation of ownership, a description of the business activity, changes since the previous year. Let the AI draft first answers from your own notes. You read them, correct what is wrong, and approve. The result is a tidy log you can hand over whole, rather than a pile of half-finished sentences.
What stays with you
The AI is a diligent clerk — not the auditor, and not you. Every figure and every statement remains your responsibility. The model drafts; you verify. Never let it invent a number or a fact: if it is unsure, the answer must read «missing», not a guess. A revision is a correct revision, not a fast one.
Care with the data
A revision touches real financial figures and sometimes personal data. For sensitive material, use a local model or a zero-retention provider, or work with anonymised placeholders and fill in the real numbers offline afterwards. The same care you would apply to any client file — a revision is no place to relax your own data rules.
The outcome
What used to be two anxious weeks becomes a few quiet sittings. You have a checklist, a document index, a gap list and a first draft of the answers. When the deadline arrives, you send a complete, tidy package instead of a hurried pile. The auditor gets what they need, you keep your evenings, and next year the whole routine is already waiting for you — with last year's answer log as a head start.
The revision is not an exam. It is a checklist — and checklists are exactly what AI handles best.
