# Payment file (Zahlungsdatei, pain.001): paying bills, salaries, dividends, withholding tax, VAT, AHV and BVG from the bank panel

> From the Zendrea manual for AI assistants, generated 2026-10-31 from the knowledge of Zendrea's built-in assistant. All topics: https://www.zendrea.ch/llms.txt; all of them in one file: https://www.zendrea.ch/llms-full.txt. Screen names are quoted in English, account numbers are those of the standard Swiss chart, and nothing here is tax or legal advice.

The **Bank Account report** has an **"Export payment file"** button, left of "Import bank flows". It opens a list of everything currently owed and unpaid, the user ticks what to pay, and **Download file** produces an ISO 20022 **pain.001** XML — the standard Swiss payment order, successor of DTA/EZAG.

**The app never moves money.** The file is downloaded, the user uploads it in their e-banking (PostFinance: Zahlungen → "Zahlungsdatei hochladen") and **releases the payments there**. The bank-side release is the money gate. Say this whenever a user asks whether the app pays, transfers or triggers anything — it does not, and you cannot create or send a payment file yourself: there is no tool for it, so route the user to the button.

**What appears on the list.** Obligations, not bookings — "what do we owe and have not paid", from these sources: open supplier **bills** (expenses), **asset purchases**, **other** role-discovered payables, unpaid **salaries** (an open balance on the salary-payable account 2002: the payout, i.e. the net salary plus any expense reimbursements booked with it, the topic [salary-lines](https://www.zendrea.ch/docs/salary-lines.md)), **dividends** (one row per shareholder for the net, while the resolution's payout is not booked; paid to the IBAN the resolution recorded, else the person's current one, with the appropriation's booking text as the message), the **withholding tax** on a dividend (the 35 % until its remittance is booked, due 30 days after the payable date, paid to the ESTV's fixed account CH12 0900 0000 3000 4120 3 with a message naming the UID, the form and the year end; CHF books only), and the **VAT / AHV / BVG** settlements. Anything already settled drops off by itself. The list is the same whichever fiscal period is being viewed, because an unpaid obligation is owed regardless. It does NOT list already-booked payments waiting for a bank statement: such a booking cannot be told apart from one the user already paid at the bank, and paying it again would be a double payment.

**Amounts come from the books, never from a scanned receipt's guess.** A receipt's generic extracted amount is an OCR guess; the ledger holds the truth, and the receipt supplies only WHO to pay — name, IBAN and the bill's reference. One exception: a **VAT or AHV quarter with its ESTV return / AHV bill attached** pays what that document asks (its QR payment slip, checked against the document's own bottom line), the amount the authority expects — the same figure the pay dialog pre-fills. A paid VAT or AHV quarter never comes back, whatever the books leave on it (the year's end settles that). The VAT **Jahresabstimmung** of a year appears once its form is attached on the VAT report's correction row and read as asking money, until its payment is booked: the amount the form asks, to the IBAN it names (else the ESTV's CH60 0900 0000 3000 0037 5), with the message the form asks for, "<MWST number> J<year>" ("A<year>" for a French or Italian user), due on day 180 after the year's end.

**Who to pay: the bill's receipt first, then the supplier.** When a bill has no receipt with an IBAN (no receipt at all, a photo, a PDF without a QR-bill) and it is booked to a NAMED supplier (a K-… account, not the collective 2000/2004), the payee comes from that supplier's record instead: the **IBAN** and optional **fixed payment reference** saved in the supplier dialog (Settings → Suppliers), with the supplier's own name and address. This is how a recurring bill such as rent goes into the file without attaching a receipt every month — ideally via an expense preset that pins that supplier, so each month's booking lands on its K-account. A receipt with an IBAN always wins over the record: it belongs to that specific bill (its QR reference is per invoice) and the supplier may have changed banks. The fixed reference is only for suppliers that expect the SAME reference on every payment; a QR-IBAN (as property managers often use) cannot be paid without one. **Every payable row is ticked by default, and the app does not know about standing orders:** if a supplier is already paid by a standing order (Dauerauftrag) or direct debit at the bank, the user must untick its rows, or the file pays it a second time.

**Why a row is greyed out.** Greyed rows cannot go into the file and show the reason instead of a payee. They are the to-do list: **"No IBAN found"** (attach the bill's receipt to the booking; for a bill booked to a named supplier, save the supplier's IBAN under Settings → Suppliers instead; for a salary, fill the person's IBAN in the person dialog under Settings → Persons (the one IBAN serves salary and dividends); for a dividend, the shareholder's IBAN under Settings → Persons; a bill on the collective 2000/2004 names no supplier, so only a receipt can supply its payee), **"IBAN is not valid"** / **"Reference number is not valid"** (the extraction misread it — check against the paper bill), **"QR reference does not match the IBAN"** and **"QR-IBAN without a valid QR reference"** (a QR reference is only payable against a QR-IBAN and vice versa — the bank would reject the mismatch; a supplier saved with a QR-IBAN also needs its fixed QR reference in the supplier dialog, which flags both problems while typing), **"No payee name"**, and for BVG **"The pension bill can only be attached after booking"** (BVG receipts hang off the payment entry, so an unpaid BVG year has no payment data yet). A blocked row cannot be selected, and the export refuses anything that became unpayable since the list opened.

**Due dates come from the document, else the law.** A VAT or AHV quarter with its ESTV return / AHV bill attached is due on the date the document prints (the return's "Valuta (Verzugszins ab)", the bill's "Zahlungseingang bis"); without one, VAT is due on the **30th of the second month** after the reporting period (end of February for a period ending in December — the date the ESTV prints for the law's 60 days, Art. 71/86 MWSTG) and AHV **10 days** after the quarter (Art. 34 Abs. 3 AHVV) — the same dates the deadlines panel shows. Each payment is scheduled on **its own due date** inside the file, a due date on a weekend on the **Friday before** (a bank asked to pay on a Saturday pays on the Monday, too late), and never before today. Salaries are batched into one bank-statement line (payroll must not appear per employee), and so are a dividend's payouts (one line, matching the one payout booking); everything else books individually so each payment can be reconciled on its own.

**The loop closes by itself.** Executed payments come back in the bank's camt.053 statement, which the user imports with "Import bank flows" next to the export button (the topic [bank-file-import](https://www.zendrea.ch/docs/bank-file-import.md)), and the existing reconciliation settles the items. V1 pays in the company's base currency and the full open amount — for a partial payment or a Skonto deduction, the user books the payment by hand as before.