What is quints?

quints is a command line tool that helps small Swiss companies handle their bookkeeping in plain text files instead of proprietary accounting software. It builds on top of an existing plain text accounting system called beancount, and it adds the specific paperwork a small Swiss business, whether a GmbH, an AG, or a sole proprietorship, actually has to produce: quarterly VAT returns, official statutory financial statements, and Swiss style QR bill invoices. A notable design choice is that quints is meant to be operated by an AI coding agent such as Claude Code, rather than by a person typing commands directly, or at least alongside one. The tool itself never calls an AI model. Instead it stays a predictable, checkable command line program: the agent proposes bookkeeping entries in plain text, and quints validates them and reports back whether they are correct. Setting up a new set of books scaffolds a project with a chart of accounts already matched to the official Swiss KMU accounting framework, a folder structure for yearly transaction files, and instruction files that tell a coding agent how to extend and check the books going forward. From there, the tool can print the official quarterly VAT form, list unpaid customer invoices by due date, generate a year end balance sheet and income statement as a PDF in the correct legal format, fetch official Swiss exchange rates and calculate year end currency revaluations, and turn bank or payment provider statements into draft entries that wait in a review folder rather than going straight into the books. It can also generate a Swiss QR bill invoice as a PDF and check that its total matches what is actually recorded in the ledger. Installation is a single command using a Python package installer such as uv, pipx, or pip, and it requires Python 3.10 or newer. The project is made up of several smaller packages, including separate importers for UBS, Wise, and Stripe statements, all published together and pulled in automatically when quints itself is installed.