TILL

TILL

Trusted Independent Ledger Library. The agent-first ERP for Swiss SMEs.

TILL is a free, open-source (MIT) ERP for Swiss small businesses: sales, purchasing, payments, stock, projects, books and MWST. Every function is exposed as an MCP tool, 800 of them, so your AI agent runs it and the Studio (the app you work in) shows you what it did. It works with Claude Desktop, Cursor and other MCP clients that can start a local stdio server. TILL runs on your own computer, or on a server you host yourself. Your books are a single SQLite file on that machine, and no server of ours holds a copy.

By default, the agent waits for your OK before it books anything, moves your money, grants access or deletes your data for good: it drafts, and you approve. For each of those areas you decide whether it may act on its own. Much of what you can change back, such as drafts and contact details, runs without asking, and every call the agent makes is recorded. The dial covers agents that connect to TILL. An agent that can drive your browser or run commands on your computer can act as you: give your agent TILL, not your browser or your shell.

Public beta, version 1.0.0-beta.1. Nomadik GmbH, the company behind TILL, keeps its own books in it. If you move your books to TILL, keep your old system running until the figures match, and read what the beta does not do yet first.

Why

TILL is MIT licensed and costs nothing. You can run it, change it and keep it, with no limit on users, companies or bookings, and your books stay on a computer you control. It is built for what makes Swiss books Swiss:

• QR-bill (Swiss QR-Rechnung) with the structured-address standard
• MWST at 8.1%, 3.8% and 2.6%, with the effective and the Saldosteuersatz method, and the MWST-Abrechnung drawn straight from the ledger
• Kontenrahmen KMU seeded out of the box
• ISO 20022 banking: camt.053 statements in, pain.001 payment files out
• de-CH and en

What TILL covers

• Accounting: double-entry ledger, period locks and year close, foreign currencies and revaluation, accruals, fixed assets, and several companies in one install.
• MWST: the MWST-Abrechnung per period, reconciled to the ledger, and the eCH-0217 file you upload to the ESTV ePortal.
• Sales: quotes, orders, delivery notes, invoices with the QR-bill, credit notes, recurring invoices, reminder letters and the open-items list.
• Purchasing: supplier bills with input VAT, purchase orders, goods receipt, expense claims, and pain.001 payment files that you release in your eBanking. TILL never sends a payment.
• Bank: import the camt.053 statements from your eBanking. The bank inbox proposes a booking for each line it can place, and you confirm it.
• Contacts and CRM, products and stock (warehouses, lots and serial numbers, stock valuation), projects and time tracking, documents, reports.
• Moving in: import from bexio's CSV and Excel exports (there is no bexio API connection), a trial company to try the import on, and a parallel run that checks TILL's figures against your old system. Fixed assets, stock and payroll history do not come over, and last year's journal lands in a read-only archive beside the live books.

The ledger is not negotiable

Posted entries are append-only and immutable. A correction is a reversing entry, never a destructive edit, exactly as real accounting works. Posting is idempotent: a double-post does not double-count. These are asserted in the test suite, not merely promised in a README.

Install and run

You need Node.js 22 or newer on macOS or Linux.

npm install -g tillbooks@beta
till up

Keep the @beta. Until the beta ends, a plain tillbooks on npm is the old 0.1.0, which has no Studio.

till up starts the Studio at http://127.0.0.1:8788 and opens it in your browser. It listens on your own machine only. The first screen offers three ways in: create a new ledger, restore a backup, or restart TILL on an existing database file. Beneath them, Try the demo sets up a demo workspace with sample postings. Your books go to ~/.till/till.db; set TILL_DB_PATH to put them somewhere else.

To connect an MCP client such as Claude Desktop or Cursor, point it at the stdio server. No account and no API key are needed:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tillbooks": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "tillbooks@beta", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

The agent and the Studio work on the same file, so what the agent does shows up in the Studio.

To work on TILL itself, build it from a checkout:

npm run setup            # installs the core and the Studio dependencies
npm run build:all        # builds the core into dist/ and the Studio into app/dist/
node bin/till.mjs up

CONTRIBUTING.md has the full dev setup, and the quickstart walks through the first run.

Your data

• Your books are one SQLite file. You can copy it, back it up and open it with standard tools.
• No account, no sign-up, no telemetry. TILL does not report on you or on how you use it. Error details are recorded only if you switch that on, they stay on your machine, and they leave it only in a feedback mail you send yourself.
• You can export a whole company at any time in an open, documented format, and a backup restores into a fresh workspace without touching the ones you have.

What the beta does not do yet

• No payroll. TILL exports your employee data for your payroll provider and posts the wage journal you bring back. Pay slips, AHV and Swissdec stay with the provider.
• No MWST filing. TILL prepares the MWST-Abrechnung and writes the eCH-0217 file. You upload it and file in the ESTV ePortal yourself.
• No MWST on received consideration (vereinnahmte Entgelte). TILL computes the Abrechnung on agreed consideration (vereinbarte Entgelte) and refuses a period set up the other way.
• No email sending yet. TILL makes the PDF of an invoice, quote or reminder, and you send it from your own mail program. Sending through your own mail account is planned for a later beta release.
• German (de-CH) and English only. No French or Italian yet.
• No mobile app, and no Windows app. We do not test on Windows; the documented route there is running TILL inside an agent.
• No direct bank connection in this release. The EBICS client is built and has been tested with ZKB's test platform, but the module that connects it to the bank is not published yet (it will be, under MIT). Until then you download camt.053 statements from your eBanking and import them.
• On your own computer, backups run when you start them (Data & Backup, "Back up now"), not on a schedule. Keep a copy of the backup file somewhere other than the computer the books are on. (The self-hosting recipe replicates the book continuously with Litestream.)
• Several people in one book only on a server you host yourself. The local app is for one computer.
• No eBill sending, e-signature or online customer portal.

Documentation

• Quickstart : install, first run, and connecting your agent
• Run inside an agent : drive TILL over MCP with no machine of your own
• Self-hosting in under an hour : stand up a served instance
• Documentation : the product guides and capability reference
• Design : the design law this project builds to

Before you use it

TILL keeps books, so DISCLAIMER.md is worth two minutes: TILL is not tax advice, you stay responsible for your own filings, and a beta deserves a parallel run before you rely on it.

Help is free and best effort during the beta, and paid help with setup and with moving from bexio is available. SUPPORT.md has the details.

Contributing

• CONTRIBUTING.md : how to run it, and the rules that are not negotiable
• CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md : how we treat each other
• SECURITY.md : report vulnerabilities privately to security@tillbooks.ch
• SUPPORT.md : where to ask questions

License

MIT, Copyright (c) 2026 Nomadik GmbH. See LICENSE.

TILL is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from bexio AG or any other accounting vendor. It is a clean-room implementation built from public documentation.