The guide
Guide: project time and expense tracking in Switzerland
Tracking time and expenses per project serves two needs at once: invoicing all the work done and meeting the Swiss obligation to record working time. Well organised, it also feeds project margin and capacity planning.
Why track time and expenses per project?
For an agency, an engineering office or a fiduciary, time is the raw material. An hour not logged is an hour not invoiced, and a forgotten expense is a cost the company absorbs. Time logged at the end of the week from memory regularly underestimates the time actually spent, especially small interventions and exchanges with the client.
Tracking per project also shows where the effort goes. By allocating each hour to a project, a phase and an activity, you see which services are profitable, which clients consume more than planned and which phases regularly exceed their estimate. This data then helps you price the next proposals better. Without reliable time tracking, project margin and capacity planning rest on guesswork.
What does Swiss law say about recording working time?
The Labour Act (art. 46) and its ordinance OLT 1 art. 73 require employers to keep records available to the authorities showing daily and weekly working time, overtime and breaks of half an hour or more. Simplified regimes or a waiver are possible for certain managers and autonomous employees, under conditions such as a written agreement.
Overtime is governed by CO art. 321c: it is compensated by time off of equal length or paid with a 25 % supplement, unless otherwise agreed in writing. A project time tracking tool that time-stamps every entry, computes the hours balance and keeps the history meets these requirements while also serving billing. Numezis links HR time recording and project time to avoid double entry.
How should you handle expenses rebilled to clients?
A rebillable expense, travel, accommodation, printing or material bought for the client, should be attached to the project as soon as it is incurred. The supporting document is essential: it proves the expense, allows input tax recovery where conditions are met and is kept for ten years under CO art. 958f and VAT Act art. 70.
When recharging, two questions arise: do you rebill at actual cost or with a mark-up, and which VAT rate applies? As a rule, a rebilled expense follows the VAT treatment of the main service, at the standard 8.1 % rate in most service engagements. Numezis lets you set the rule per client or per project, shows the receipt next to the invoice line and keeps the link between the expense claim, the document and the invoice.
How should timesheet approval be organised?
Approval is the moment when a logged hour becomes a billable hour. The most effective approach is to give this approval to the project manager, who knows the work done, on a weekly rhythm rather than at month-end. Deviations are then corrected while everyone still remembers.
Plan a rule for special cases: the project manager does not approve their own hours, a deputy takes over during absences, and a sent-back entry must carry a reason. Once approved, the entry is locked to protect the invoice. In Numezis, approvals arrive as grouped cards, in the browser or the messaging app of your choice, and the history keeps track of every decision and every correction.
Excel timesheet or time tracking software?
A spreadsheet works for a team of two or three people, as long as projects are few. Beyond that it shows its limits: multiple versions, broken formulas, no approval control, manual retyping into billing and accounting, and expense receipts stored somewhere else.
Time tracking software linked to projects removes these steps. Logged hours feed the work to invoice, the project cost and the planning directly. Expenses arrive with their receipt. Reports are produced without copy and paste. For a Swiss SME, also check data hosting in Switzerland, nFADP compliance, overtime calculation and availability in several national languages. This is the foundation on which Numezis builds billing, budget and capacity.