kniv
kniv is a Swiss SaaS tool that automates supplier-invoice and expense handling for bexio users. Its AI reads each document, then writes the extracted data straight into bexio through the official API, with a permanent free tier.
What is kniv?
kniv is a Swiss software-as-a-service product that automates two back-office chores for companies whose accounting already runs in bexio, the Swiss cloud ERP for small and mid-sized businesses. It is published by achtpunkt GmbH, a software company based in St. Gallen, and sold as a single brand covering two modules that can be bought separately: kniv Kreditoren for supplier invoices and kniv Spesen for employee expenses.
On the payables side, an invoice reaches kniv by e-mail forwarding, through the bexio inbox or by direct upload. The AI reads it and extracts the vendor, the amount, the VAT rate, the due date and the ledger account, then creates the supplier invoice draft inside bexio itself. The user checks the proposed values, adjusts whatever needs adjusting and releases the entry without leaving bexio. A learning function analyses the booking history so that, when a supplier recurs, the account it was posted to last time is pre-filled.
On the expense side, an employee photographs the receipt and submits it from a phone. Amount, category, VAT and date are recognised automatically. Managers see every pending expense in one list and approve them digitally, and approved items are posted into bexio together with the payroll run.
Authentication runs exclusively through bexio's OAuth 2.0 flow: credentials are entered on bexio.com and kniv never stores them. Several bexio accounts can be managed side by side, and PDF, JPG and PNG files are accepted. The vendor states repeatedly that only bexio's official, documented APIs are used, with no unofficial method and no third-party scraping, and that kniv is an independent third-party tool with no formal partnership with bexio AG.
The published audience is Swiss SMEs and fiduciaries, across eleven named sectors that run from IT service providers, law offices and craft businesses to insurance brokers, dental surgeries and physiotherapy practices. One detail is worth knowing: until February 2026 the same domain carried a different product from the same vendor, an ERP integrated into Outlook. The accounting positioning described here dates from March 2026.
What it does
- Read supplier invoices with AI and extract the vendor, amount, VAT rate, due date and ledger account
- Create the supplier invoice draft directly inside bexio, without leaving bexio
- Capture an expense receipt from a phone photo and recognise amount, category, VAT and date
- Route expenses through a digital approval step handled by the manager
- Post approved expenses into bexio alongside the payroll run
- Learn from booking history and pre-fill the ledger account for a recurring supplier
- Take documents in by e-mail forwarding, bexio inbox, direct upload or drag and drop
When to use kniv / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if kniv is the right fit.
When to use kniv
- Swiss SMEs that already run their accounting in bexio and want supplier invoices booked without retyping anything
- Fiduciaries and tax advisers handling the books of several client companies, who can also join the vendor's partner programme
- Small teams that need a traceable approval trail for staff expenses, from a phone photo through to the payroll run
- Owner-managed businesses in the sectors the vendor names, from IT services and law offices to joinery, insurance broking, dental and physiotherapy practices
- Organisations processing between 5 and 1,000 documents a month, which is the range the published tiers cover
When not to use kniv
- Any company that does not use bexio: no other accounting system is supported and a bexio account is a hard prerequisite
- Teams that need an interface in French, Italian or English, since everything the vendor publishes is in German only
- Users expecting a native mobile app: expense capture runs through the browser and no iOS or Android application exists
- Developers who want to plug the tool into their own stack, as no customer-facing API and no public technical documentation are offered
- Buyers who require a formal security certification, since the vendor holds none and the only certification mentioned on the site is Google's
How to use kniv
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Make sure you have an active bexio account, as kniv does not work without one
- Start from the sign-up page on kniv.ch and continue to the application at app.kniv.ch
- Sign in through bexio's OAuth 2.0 flow, entering your credentials on bexio.com and never on kniv
- Confirm once which permissions kniv receives on your bexio data
- Choose your AI engine in the settings, either Google Gemini or Infomaniak, and change it later if you wish
- For payables, forward the invoice by e-mail, drop it into the bexio inbox or upload it directly
- Check the values kniv extracted and correct anything that is wrong
- Release the draft that kniv has already created as a supplier invoice in bexio
- For expenses, have staff photograph the receipt and submit it from their phone
- Approve the pending expenses as manager, then let kniv post them into bexio with the payroll run
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Permanent free tier on both modules, ten documents a month for payables and five for expenses, with no credit card required
- Fully public pricing: eight tiers, each with its monthly price and its per-document overage cost
- The customer picks the AI engine and can rule out training entirely by choosing Infomaniak, which processes in Switzerland and keeps nothing
- An explicit right to object to the anonymised use of documents for algorithm improvement, written into article 5.3 of the terms
- A separate data processing agreement is offered and stated to meet GDPR and Swiss requirements
- Retention periods are given category by category with actual figures rather than in general terms
- The vendor is identifiable: full legal notice, company identification number, named managing director and a direct phone line
Cons
- Total dependency on bexio, since the tool is single-ERP and unusable without a bexio account
- German only, with no other locale served and no additional interface language declared
- No native mobile application, even though expense capture is presented as a phone-first workflow
- No customer-facing API and no public technical documentation
- No security certification of any kind; the only certification mentioned on the site belongs to Google
- The hosting location of the platform itself is never disclosed, only unnamed categories of cloud providers
- Choosing Google Gemini sends receipts to the United States, where Google may store them and use them for training
Pricing & Plans
kniv offers a permanent free tier on each of its two modules, ten documents a month for kniv Kreditoren and five for kniv Spesen, with no credit card required. The cheapest paid entry point is CHF 15.00 per month, for kniv Spesen at fifty documents a month; kniv Kreditoren starts at CHF 23.00 per month for one hundred documents. All amounts are quoted excluding VAT, and annual billing carries a 15% discount. Documents processed above the monthly allowance are charged individually, from CHF 0.90 down to CHF 0.30 each depending on the tier.
- 10 documents per month
- CHF 0
- overage CHF 0.90 per document
- CHF 23.00 per month monthly
- or CHF 19.55 per month on annual billing (CHF 234.60 per year)
- overage CHF 0.50 per document
- CHF 32.00 per month
- overage CHF 0.40 per document
- CHF 58.00 per month
- overage CHF 0.30 per document
- 5 documents per month
- CHF 0
- overage CHF 0.90 per document
- CHF 15.00 per month monthly
- or CHF 12.75 per month on annual billing (CHF 153.00 per year)
- overage CHF 0.50 per document
- CHF 23.00 per month
- overage CHF 0.40 per document
- CHF 42.00 per month
- overage CHF 0.30 per document
- the published tiers price the monthly document allowance
- not seats
- Features do not change from one tier to the next
- only the monthly document allowance does
- No enterprise tier and no quote-based pricing are published
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how kniv handles your data.
GDPR overview
The privacy policy states that it is designed to meet the requirements of the GDPR, the Swiss Data Protection Act and its revised version, while noting that whether and how far those laws apply depends on the individual case. Article 10.2 of the terms adds that the separate data processing agreement meets GDPR and Swiss requirements. Concrete mentions are present: enumerated rights of access, rectification, erasure, portability and withdrawal of consent; identification before a request is acted on; the revised European Commission standard contractual clauses for recipients in countries without adequate protection; Google LLC described as certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework; and the Swiss FDPIC named as supervisory authority, with a pointer to the local authority for EEA and UK residents. No Article 27 EU representative is designated anywhere, and no data protection officer is named.
Who owns the data?
achtpunkt GmbH, registered in St. Gallen under UID CHE-430.059.454, is the controller. Article 10.3 of the terms is explicit: the customer keeps full control of and responsibility for their own data and may at any time request access, export or deletion. Article 3.3 places the lawfulness of every uploaded document on the customer. Where achtpunkt processes personal data on the customer's behalf, article 10.2 provides for a separate data processing agreement stated to meet GDPR and Swiss data protection requirements. Requests go to a single address, info@achtpunkt.ch, and the vendor may ask for identification before acting on one.
Reuse rights
The terms grant the customer no reuse rights over the software itself: article 2.1 licenses kniv on a non-exclusive, non-transferable and non-sublicensable basis for the life of the contract, and article 2.3 leaves every right in the product with the vendor. The customer's own data is treated differently. Article 10.3 allows export or deletion at any time without asking permission, and article 8.4 promises deletion within thirty days of contract end. In the other direction, article 5.3 lets the vendor use uploaded documents in anonymised form to improve its recognition algorithms, with personal data stripped out, and grants the customer an explicit right to object. The privacy policy adds a second lever: the AI engine that reads each document is chosen by the customer and can be switched at any time in the settings.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The vendor does not name the host of the kniv platform itself: the privacy policy refers only to unnamed cloud and hosting providers. What it does name is where the two selectable AI engines process documents. Infomaniak SA processes in Switzerland, stores nothing permanently and does not use the data for model training. Google LLC, through Gemini, processes in the United States and other countries, may keep the data on its servers and may use it to improve and train Gemini; the policy describes Google as certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. More generally, the policy states that recipients are not all located in Switzerland and that data may be processed in Europe as well as in other countries, with the revised European Commission standard contractual clauses applied to recipients in countries lacking adequate protection. The choice of engine, and therefore the processing jurisdiction of the documents themselves, rests with the customer and can be changed at any time. Anyone whose compliance position depends on where the platform database physically sits will have to ask the vendor directly.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting kniv.
- The pricing toggle opens on annual billing, so the CHF 19.55 and CHF 12.75 you see first are monthly equivalents of a yearly commitment, not the monthly prices, which are CHF 23.00 and CHF 15.00 excluding VAT
- Automatic recognition invites blind approval, yet the vendor disclaims all liability for wrong extractions and the resulting booking errors: a human still has to read what the AI proposed
- The account suggestion learns from your own booking history, so an early miscoding can be repeated quietly across later invoices instead of being caught
- If Google Gemini is left as the AI engine, receipts leave for the United States and Google may store them and use them to train its models; the Infomaniak alternative keeps them in Switzerland
- Uploaded documents and extracted data are kept for the contract duration plus ten years, while the terms promise deletion within thirty days of contract end, and the two documents are not reconciled
- Going over the monthly document allowance is billed per document, from CHF 0.30 to CHF 0.90, so the real cost tracks volume rather than the headline tier price
- The tool concentrates a bookkeeping process on one small vendor and one ERP: the legal entity was only registered in September 2024, and the product itself was repositioned in early 2026
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low. kniv is a browser-based service with nothing to install, and the only prerequisite is an active bexio account. Connecting the two means approving an OAuth 2.0 authorisation once on bexio.com, after which kniv reuses the chart of accounts and tax rates already held in bexio, so no accounting configuration is needed on the customer's side. The vendor advertises a setup of a few minutes and displays a ready-in-three-minutes claim on its home page. The only decision to make is which AI engine to use, and it can be changed later.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind kniv
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a bexio account to use kniv?
Can I try kniv before paying?
How much does kniv cost?
Which file formats does kniv accept?
Are my documents used to train an AI?
Is kniv a bexio product?
Can I manage several bexio accounts?
Is a data processing agreement available?
How long are my documents kept, and how do I cancel?
Should you pick kniv?
kniv is a deliberately narrow product, and its narrowness is the point. It does one job — turning supplier invoices and expense receipts into bexio bookkeeping entries — for one accounting system, in one market, in one language. For a Swiss SME already committed to bexio, that focus is an argument: the setup is an OAuth approval away, the chart of accounts and tax codes come from bexio itself, and the entry sits in bexio rather than in an export file waiting to be imported.
What stands out beyond the automation is how much the vendor puts in writing. Eight pricing tiers are published with their monthly price and their per-document overage. Retention periods are given category by category with figures. A separate data processing agreement is offered. And unusually for a company of this size, the customer chooses which AI engine reads their documents, with a Swiss option that stores nothing and trains on nothing, plus an explicit right to object to the anonymised reuse of documents.
The reservations are equally concrete. There is no security certification; the only certification the site mentions belongs to Google. The hosting location of the platform itself is never disclosed. The privacy policy and the terms contradict each other on what happens to documents when a contract ends. And the venture is young: the legal entity was entered in the commercial register in September 2024, and the product visible today replaced an entirely different one on the same domain in March 2026.
For a bexio user drowning in paper, kniv is a low-risk thing to test, since the free tier is permanent and needs no card. For a buyer with a formal vendor-assurance process, several questions still need to be put to the vendor directly.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.