Made for Swiss self-employed & SMEs
Since June 2020, every invoice in Switzerland carries a QR-bill — the payment slip with the Swiss QR code that replaced the old orange and red slips. For a self-employed person or a small office, it is one of those tasks that should be trivial, yet quietly causes trouble: a wrong reference, a missing QR-IBAN, or a message line that breaks the machine reading.
The good news is that the QR-bill is not complicated once you know the few fields that matter. And the reassuring part: most of the fiddly assembly — checking the reference, lining up the fields, drafting the invoice text — is exactly what AI is good at.
Why the QR-bill still trips people up
The QR-bill looks simple, but small mistakes are common and they cost time more than anything. A bill that a scanner cannot read means a phone call from the client, a corrected invoice, and a delayed payment.
- The QR-IBAN. The QR reference only works with a QR-IBAN. Mix a normal IBAN with a QR reference and the payment can be rejected.
- The reference. The 27-digit QR reference has a check digit. One mistyped digit and the whole line fails.
- The message lines. The unstructured message has strict rules about length and characters; get them wrong and the data no longer fits the code.
- The layout. The payment part must sit at the bottom, with a receipt section, a separator line, and a QR code with enough quiet space around it.
What a QR-bill actually needs
Strip away the layout and the QR-bill is just a short list of fields. If these are right, the rest follows:
- Account / Payable to: your IBAN (ideally a QR-IBAN), plus your name and address.
- Reference: either the 27-digit QR reference or a structured creditor reference.
- Amount and currency: CHF or EUR, written clearly.
- Payable by: the client's name and address.
- Additional information: the invoice number and a short message, in the right format.
An AI routine to build one
Step 1 — Keep a master block
Write down your own payment details once — IBAN, name, address, and your preferred reference style — in a short note you can reuse. This is the only part that never changes, and it is the part most likely to contain a typo if you retype it every time.
Step 2 — Let the AI assemble the fields
Give the AI your master block and the invoice details, and ask it to prepare the payment data in the right format:
You are helping a Swiss self-employed person prepare a QR-bill. My details: [name], [address], IBAN [QR-IBAN]. Invoice: number [n], amount [amount] CHF, client [name and address]. Please list the fields in the correct QR-bill format — account, reference, amount, currency, payable by, and the additional information line with the invoice number — and flag anything missing or inconsistent.
Step 3 — Proofread the reference
Read the reference digit by digit against your records before you save the invoice. This is the one field no machine can fix for you, and it is the one that sends a payment to the wrong place when it is wrong.
A second prompt: checking the bill
Before you send, let the AI check the finished invoice the way a careful colleague would:
Check this invoice for common Swiss QR-bill mistakes: is the QR reference consistent with the QR-IBAN, is the amount written correctly, are the message lines within the allowed length, and is the payment part at the bottom with a receipt section? List anything that would stop the bill from being scanned correctly.
One honest caveat
The AI does not draw the QR code itself, and it should not. Generate the code with your invoicing software or your bank's online tool, then let the AI handle the words around it — the fields, the message, the proofread. Treat the AI as the careful colleague who checks the details, not as the printer.
The outcome
One short master note, one prompt to assemble the fields, and one read-through of the reference. A QR-bill that used to take twenty careful minutes and still came back with errors becomes a two-minute routine — and the payments arrive on time because the bill is right the first time.
