Vidima Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. What makes Vidima unique?

   Vidima is Swiss QR-bill software that runs entirely on your own computer. There is no account to create, no server holding your books, and no subscription: you pay once and the version you bought keeps working. It is not a cut-down tool either — it issues compliant QR invoices, keeps double-entry books with an SME chart of accounts, prepares the VAT return by FTA code, and reconciles incoming payments from camt.053 and camt.054 bank statements. Almost everything else in this category is a cloud subscription. Vidima is the opposite bet: your data stays encrypted on your disk, and the program works with the Internet unplugged.

2. Why should a person choose Vidima over its competitors?

   Three reasons: you buy it instead of renting it (CHF 149 once for Personal), your client data never leaves your computer, and it keeps working offline — a connection problem or a service outage never stops you invoicing. Migration is built in: you can pull clients, chart of accounts and entries straight from Bexio, or from a file exported by Banana, and see exactly what will be imported before anything is touched.

   Where a competitor is the better answer: if several people need to edit the same books at the same time, if you need payroll, or if you want a full ERP with stock and project management, choose Bexio or Abacus instead. Vidima is built for one person or a very small firm who wants to invoice properly and keep the books without a monthly bill.

3. How would you describe the primary audience of Vidima?

   Swiss freelancers, sole proprietors and micro-businesses — tradespeople such as electricians, plumbers and builders, consultants, designers, therapists, small shops and local associations, plus the fiduciary firms that keep the books for them. Two things they have in common: they invoice in Switzerland, so they need a compliant QR-bill and a Swiss VAT return, and they would rather buy a tool once than rent it forever. The interface and the invoice PDFs are available in German, French, Italian, English and Spanish, which covers the country's language regions; an invoice can print in a different language from the one you work in.

4. What's the story behind Vidima?

   Vidima is made by Helvecraft, a small independent studio in Ticino, Switzerland. It came out of a plain observation: invoicing in Switzerland means producing a QR-bill, and the choices were a cloud subscription billed every year forever, or a desktop program that had not been redesigned in fifteen years. Neither is a good deal for someone who sends a few dozen invoices a year.

   So Vidima was built the old way — a program you install, that opens in about a second, keeps your data on your own disk, and that you buy once. The first public version shipped in May 2026, and it has been updated steadily since, most of it driven by what the people using it actually asked for.

5. Which are the primary technologies used for building Vidima?

   Rust with Tauri 2 for the application itself, and an interface written in plain JavaScript, HTML and Tailwind CSS with no front-end framework. That is why the installer is small and the program starts in about a second, instead of bundling a whole browser engine the way an Electron app does. The QR-bill and the PDF are generated locally on your machine. The local vault is encrypted with AES-GCM, with the key derived by PBKDF2-SHA256 at 600'000 iterations through the platform's own Web Crypto implementation. Builds are universal for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and x64 for Windows.