What is Banana Accounting?
Banana Accounting is a Swiss desktop accounting program with a long history. It was developed as early as 1989 (for MS-DOS back then) specifically for small businesses and the self-employed, and it is still popular today.
It is a widespread choice among users looking for a low-cost, comprehensive solution. With its Excel-like booking screen, Banana provides a solid basis for managing finances and is especially popular with associations and in education for teaching financial accounting.
The software is available in several versions that offer different features and levels of support depending on your needs.
Advantages of Banana
Comprehensive feature set
Banana covers all the basic needs of an accounting system and also offers invoicing and specialised features such as securities management or built-in fixed asset accounting.
Banana also includes built-in budgeting and cash flow planning features, which let you make forecasts about how the business will develop. Detailed project analyses are also possible if users have the necessary background knowledge.
Customer and supplier management lets users keep track of everything in this area and manage open items efficiently. Banana also offers features for reconciling credit card statements, which makes the bookkeeping process considerably simpler and faster.
Highly extensible & customisable
Another advantage of Banana is that it can be flexibly extended with widgets. These let users adapt the software to their individual needs and, with a bit of technical know-how, extend its features as they wish. This flexibility is particularly useful for companies with special requirements that still want to use one central software solution.
For freelancers in Switzerland, Banana offers particularly useful VAT management tools tailored to the legal requirements. This makes compliance easier and reduces the effort involved in preparing tax returns.
Low-cost software
Earlier versions of Banana could be bought with a one-off payment, which made Banana very popular with the self-employed. This option no longer exists – Banana now only sells annual subscriptions. Even so, Banana's various plans are still among the cheapest on the entire market, and they can cover practically all the needs of freelancers and SMEs.
Disadvantages of Banana
Not very beginner-friendly
Banana's design is showing its age, and by today's standards the user interface is cumbersome. At first glance, it's fairly hard for a layperson to find important features such as invoicing.
At the same time, solid accounting knowledge is a must to use the program correctly for your own business accounts.
In addition, Banana has no interface to other programs or modern AI solutions. Payroll is not covered either.
Harder collaboration, as it's not cloud software
Another deal-breaker for many is that Banana is one of the only accounting solutions that offers no cloud integration.
This means that you can't flexibly access your accounts from other devices, and working with several people is harder than with cloud solutions such as Bexio or infinity.swiss.
Limited support
A major drawback of Banana is that even the most expensive subscription includes only three support cases per year. This can quickly leave problems unresolved. As Banana's user interface is comparatively complicated, new users quickly need help – although the help documentation on the website can partly fill the gap.
How much does Banana cost?
There is a free version that works well for associations, for example, but is heavily restricted for businesses: the accounting file is limited to 70 booking lines.
The Professional subscription costs CHF 89.– per year (as of September 2026), making it one of the cheapest offerings in Switzerland. It includes the basic features needed to keep accounts. Users registered for VAT cannot use this version to prepare VAT returns.
The Advanced subscription costs CHF 179.– per year and, in addition to VAT returns, offers extra features such as filtering and sorting cells, support, and no line limits for exported invoices and bookings.
What do users say?
Many users appreciate that the software is tailored to people with basic accounting knowledge. The application does its job as a tool for financial records and offers a solid range of features for those who don't need to carry out complex tasks.
However, a lot of it feels outdated, and a major move to a contemporary user interface is urgently needed, users say.
Most recently, the decision to force users onto the new subscription model caused discontent. Users also repeatedly complain that the mobile app does not work as it should.
Who is Banana right for?
The free version of Banana Accounting is well suited to associations, education and private individuals with strong accounting knowledge. For many businesses, however, this version is too limited.
Banana's two paid versions are significantly cheaper than comparable competing products. If price is your deciding factor and you don't mind more cumbersome operation and the lack of secure collaboration in the cloud, Banana is a reasonable solution.
Who is behind Banana?
Banana.ch SA is based in Lugano and was founded in 1990, making it one of the oldest accounting software providers in the country. The experience it has gained over this long history makes Banana.ch SA a provider to be taken seriously in the accounting software field.
Comparison with Infinity
Banana includes features for certain niches that Infinity does not cover. These include securities management, construction and renovation management, and inventory management. Most service businesses, however, don't need these features.
Banana has been on the market longer than Infinity, and you can tell from its handling, which in places is no longer up to date. Infinity makes bookkeeping much easier for users: all the complex processes happen in the background, and you always keep the overview.
While Banana allows manual bank imports, Infinity can pull in e-banking transactions from Switzerland's leading banks via a direct connection and turn them into booking suggestions using AI. AI also helps with scanning invoices and receipts and with creating quotes. That saves a great deal of time.
For newcomers, Infinity is a much more accessible solution – but people who already use Banana also benefit from less bookkeeping effort and the time saved.
The future of accounting software: trends and innovations
infinity.swiss is establishing itself on the market as innovative, cloud-based software that stands out above all for its ease of use and flexibility.
Where Banana takes a more traditional approach, infinity.swiss offers its users a modern interface that is intuitive and easy to use. This makes it easier to get started, especially for smaller businesses and start-ups that may not have in-depth accounting knowledge.
infinity.swiss releases new updates regularly, which means you can always work with the latest technology. It has had the most updates and new features over the last two years and is ahead of all other solutions in areas such as AI accounting.