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Legal forms

Pick the legal form when you scaffold the books. It decides the account namespace and the equity block. The rest of the chart (VAT, receivables, income, expenses) is the same for every form.

Applies if

  • Legal form: an Einzelunternehmen (sole proprietorship, freelancer), a GmbH or an AG.1 These are the three families the Swiss KMU Kontenrahmen prints an equity variant for.2
  • VAT status: any. The legal form and the VAT registration are independent: an Einzelfirma can be registered, and a GmbH can be below the threshold.
  • Not covered: Kollektiv- and Kommanditgesellschaft (per-partner capital blocks), Genossenschaft, Verein, Stiftung.
--legal-form Entity Account namespace
einzelfirma Einzelunternehmen — sole proprietorship, freelancer :CH:Einzelfirma:
gmbh GmbH :CH:GmbH:
ag AG :CH:AG:

quints init rejects the other forms instead of scaffolding them wrongly.

What changes: Klasse 28 (equity)

The KMU chart is identical across legal forms except the equity class. quints scaffolds the official variant:

2026-01-01 open Equity:CH:Einzelfirma:Capital CHF
  kmu: "2800"  ; Owner's equity
2026-01-01 open Equity:CH:Einzelfirma:Contributions CHF
  kmu: "2820"  ; Capital contributions and withdrawals
2026-01-01 open Equity:CH:Einzelfirma:Private CHF
  kmu: "2850"  ; Private account

No share capital and no statutory reserves. Private withdrawals go through 2850. The owner is not an employee of their own business, so what you take out is not a salary expense: the profit is your income.3

2026-01-01 open Equity:CH:GmbH:Capital:Share CHF
  kmu: "2800"  ; Share capital

2800 renders as Stammkapital (GmbH) or Aktienkapital (AG) on German statements. An owner-manager is employed by the company, so their salary is a Klasse-5 personnel expense, unlike in an Einzelfirma.

Everything else — VAT accounts, receivables, income and expense classes — is the same chart with a different namespace.

What follows from the form

  • Every account name carries the namespace: Assets:CH:Einzelfirma:Current:…
  • quints.toml records it: legal_form in [entity], entity_marker and all account names in [accounts].
  • main.bean passes the marker to the validation plugin: plugin "quints.plugins.kmu" ":CH:Einzelfirma:".
  • The Bilanz labels the equity section correctly per form (Eigenkapital / Stammkapital / Aktienkapital), in English and German.

Changing form later

There's no migration command. Rename the namespace in accounts.bean, books/*.bean, and quints.toml together, and swap the Klasse-28 block for the target form's variant. quints check tells you when you're done.

  1. GmbH: Art. 772 ff. OR; AG: Art. 620 ff. OR; Kollektiv- and Kommanditgesellschaft: Art. 552 ff. and 594 ff. OR. An Einzelunternehmen with at least CHF 100'000 turnover must be entered in the commercial register (Art. 931 Abs. 1 OR). SR 220. ↩

  2. The Schweizer Kontenrahmen KMU, edition 2023, published by SwissAccounting (formerly veb.ch). Klasse 28 is the equity class, with one variant per legal-form family. ↩

  3. The profit of an Einzelunternehmen is the owner's income from self-employment, taxed as such: Art. 18 Abs. 1 DBG, SR 642.11. ↩