Zaitgeist: a bookkeeping agent for Swiss companies

From documents to bookkeeping entries

Zaitgeist brings everyday bookkeeping into a conversation. You submit a receipt or bank statement, and the agent uses your company’s settings and Swiss accounting guidance to record it. When an essential detail is missing, the workflow calls for a question before the entry is made.

The conversation sits alongside a document archive and a view of the accounts. You can inspect the books and return to supporting receipts without searching through past messages. Changes are recorded so they can be traced later.

Working through a bank statement

A statement can contain payments already recorded, familiar expenses, and transactions that need a closer look. Zaitgeist separates these before preparing new entries.

For example, a card payment matched to an existing entry is identified as already recorded. A payment to a known supplier can use the company’s saved expense category. If the purpose of a payment is unclear, it needs clarification rather than a guessed description. This helps avoid entering the same payment twice and makes unresolved items visible.

Statement imports support specific formats; not every bank export can be processed.

Keeping the books reviewable

Entries undergo consistency checks before changes are saved. Payroll calculations also remain separate from recording the resulting payments. The workflow checks that the payroll entries balance before saving them.

These checks catch problems such as entries that do not balance. They cannot establish that every accounting decision is correct, so reviewing the books remains necessary.

Zoptimizer is a separate project investigating how this agent could complete its work more efficiently while preserving bookkeeping quality.