Pay by payment file (pain.001)

Rather than entering each transfer in your e-banking, let To Bill prepare a payment file with all the invoices you choose. You import it into your e-banking, check it and sign it: the bank pays each supplier on the planned date.

The file follows the Swiss banks’ standard, pain.001 (ISO 20022), in the version Swiss banks require from 14 November 2026.

Before you start

• The invoices are in Expenses › To pay, with their IBAN, their amount and, for a QR-IBAN, their QR reference. See Pay supplier invoices.
• Each supplier’s address shows at least their Town and Country.
• The account the money leaves from has an IBAN in To Bill: an account in Accounting › Bank › Accounts (see Add your bank accounts), or the IBAN of your QR-bills if it is not a QR-IBAN. Otherwise, you can enter the IBAN in the window.
• Your e-banking accepts imported payment files. Most Swiss banks do, sometimes under a name such as “File upload” or “Bulk payments”.

Create the file

1. In Expenses › To pay, tick the invoices to pay (1). The total of the selection appears at the bottom of the screen.

   

2. Click Payment file (pain.001) (2). The button stays greyed out if a ticked invoice cannot go into a file: already ordered or paid, or Incomplete for a reason other than the address. Hover over the button to see which one.

3. Check the number of invoices and the total. Choose the account in Account to debit, or Another IBAN… to enter a different one.

4. Choose the Execution date: the day your bank should send the payments. To Bill suggests the next working day.

   

5. Click Download the file. The XML file is saved in your downloads, and To Bill confirms: Payment file downloaded.

6. In your e-banking, import the file, check the payments, then sign them as you usually do.

The invoices change to Ordered, with their execution date. They stay in To pay until you mark them as paid.

After the payment

When you import your bank’s statement, each debit is recognised by the file’s reference and suggested in Accounting › Bank. Reconcile it: the payment is posted (2000 Accounts payable debited, your bank account credited). Then mark the invoices as paid in To pay: the payment is not posted a second time. See Reconcile payments.

Complete the suppliers’ addresses

From 14 November 2026, Swiss banks refuse a transfer whose payee has no town and country. To Bill checks all the chosen invoices before creating the file.

1. The window lists the suppliers to complete and what they are missing, for example Missing: town, country.
2. Click Complete (1). The invoice opens in a new tab, at the Supplier address section.
3. Fill in at least the Town and the Country, if possible also the Street, the No. and the Postcode, then click Save.
4. Go back to the To pay tab: the list updates by itself. When nothing is missing any more, Download the file becomes active.

If it is your own company’s address that is incomplete, To Bill says so without blocking: your bank uses the address it has on record. Complete it anyway in Settings, with the Complete in Settings link.

QR-bills already have the address

A QR-bill always contains the supplier’s town and country: To Bill takes them when it reads the QR code. Addresses are mostly missing on invoices entered by hand.

In the file, To Bill writes each address field by field: street, number, postcode, town and country. This is the structured address that banks ask for. An older QR-bill can give an address without a street, on two free lines. To Bill then sends the town and the country in their fields, and the rest on two free lines at most: this is the hybrid address. Not every bank accepts it. If yours refuses it, enter the supplier’s Street and No.: the address becomes structured again.

What the file can pay

Payment	Condition
QR-bill with a QR-IBAN	In CHF or EUR, with the 27-digit QR reference.
Invoice with a creditor reference (RF…)	In CHF or EUR, to a Swiss or Liechtenstein IBAN.
Invoice without a reference	In CHF or EUR, to a Swiss or Liechtenstein IBAN. The supplier receives the Message to the supplier (140 characters at most) or, failing that, the invoice’s number and description.
SEPA transfer	In EUR, to an IBAN in a country of the SEPA area.

Other currencies, and payments in CHF to a foreign IBAN, do not go through the file: pay them directly in your e-banking. Letters that banks do not accept are replaced by a full stop in the file; common accented letters are kept.

Cancel an order

If the file has not been signed in your e-banking, or if you have deleted the payments there, tick the invoices in To pay, then click Back to “to pay”. They become To pay again and can go into a new file.

Never the same payment twice

To Bill does not let an Ordered invoice go into a second file. If you put an invoice back to pay, check in your e-banking that the old payment has really been deleted before you send the new file.

Salaries

Salaries are also paid by pain.001 file, from the monthly payroll, with the same address check: each employee needs a town, a country and an IBAN. See Pay salaries.

Legal basis

• From 14 November 2026, the address of each party to a payment must meet the new requirements for a structured address and give at least the town and the country, each in its own field. A payment with an unstructured address can no longer be processed. Only the 2019 version of the ISO 20022 messages is still accepted: pain.001.001.09 for payment orders, camt.05x.001.08 for account statements. Your company’s address is not mandatory: the bank adds it from its own records. SIX, Adjustment of Addresses in Payment Orders and Migration to ISO 20022 Message Versions, factsheet of 19.08.2025.
• In a payment order, two forms remain allowed: the structured address, and the hybrid address (town and country in their fields, plus at most two free lines of 70 characters that repeat nothing already given in a field). The hybrid address is optional under the Swiss Payment Standards: each bank decides whether it accepts it. The QR-bill, for its part, only allows the structured address. Same SIX factsheet, and section 3.11 of the guidelines below.
• The file follows SIX’s Swiss Implementation Guidelines “Customer Credit Transfer Initiation (pain.001)”, SPS 2025 version 2.2 and SPS 2026 version 2.3: Swiss Payment Standards, ISO 20022.