Paying by Swiss QR-bill
Pay your subscription by invoice instead of by card — who it suits, when the plan starts, and what happens if a bill is paid late.
Last updated August 31, 2026
Many Swiss organisations — associations, schools, medical practices, municipalities, and anyone whose accounts go through a Treuhand — cannot or will not pay a subscription by card. Their process is simple and it works: receive an invoice, pay it in e-banking, book it. So besides card and TWINT you can pay Schweizerform by Swiss QR-bill.
Ordering — pick your plan at Settings → Plan, choose Swiss QR-bill as the payment method, and enter the billing address the invoice has to carry: your first and last name, an optional company name, the street, building number, postcode and town in Switzerland, and your own order or cost-centre reference if you use one. The invoice goes to your account's e-mail address. Both billing periods are available, monthly and yearly, exactly as on the card route.
What arrives — an e-mail with the invoice, and a View invoice link that opens the bill and its PDF without a Schweizerform account. That is deliberate: the person who pays the bill is often not the person who uses the forms. The PDF carries a Swiss QR-bill with our IBAN and the payment reference already filled in — scan it in e-banking and nothing has to be typed.
When does the plan start?
On the day we confirm your payment — not the day you sent it, and not the day you ordered. Confirming usually takes one to two working days, because a bank transfer has to arrive and be matched. Your billing period runs from that activation date, and the activation e-mail tells you the exact dates. A first invoice therefore states a duration — 1 year from payment confirmation, say — rather than a date range nobody can know yet.
Where your invoices live — on your billing page in the app: Settings → Plan → Billing & invoices. Every invoice can be opened and downloaded as a PDF, at any time, including after it has been paid.
If a bill is paid late, nothing is deleted and nothing extra is charged:
- Each invoice states its payment term, and renewal invoices are sent well before the period ends, so there is normally time in hand.
- If a renewal invoice is still open we send a reminder, and later a final notice, each naming the date the account would return to Free.
- Your plan keeps working the whole time an invoice is outstanding — a late payment does not switch anything off.
- If it is never paid, the account moves to the Free plan on the stated date. Your forms and your encrypted responses are not deleted; you simply cannot exceed the Free limits until you subscribe again.
- We charge no interest and no fees, at any stage.
A first order that is never paid simply expires at the end of its term. Nothing was granted, nothing is owed, and no reminder chain runs after it.
Changing or cancelling — an upgrade takes effect immediately and we invoice the pro-rata difference for the rest of your period. A downgrade, or a switch between monthly and yearly, takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. Cancelling also takes effect at period end, and a paid period is not refunded — cancelling in the second month of a yearly invoice forfeits the remaining ten, so cancel with the renewal date in mind rather than mid-period.
Switching between card and QR-bill
An existing subscription cannot be moved from one payment route to the other. Cancel it, let the period run out, then subscribe again on the route you want. That is a limitation, not an oversight: the two routes keep separate billing records, and moving a live subscription between them is where double charges come from.
Invoices are kept for ten years
Swiss law requires us to keep invoices for ten years (Art. 958f of the Code of Obligations), so an accounting copy of every invoice we issued you is retained for that period — including after you delete your account. It holds the billing name, address and e-mail printed on the invoice, the amount and the dates, and it is used for nothing else. Everything else about your account is still erased. This applies only if we actually issued you an invoice, which happens only on this payment route.