Why I stopped using accounting software and built my own tool instead | Billpal

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About three years ago I started my own business. I had a laundry list of things I wanted to do: projects I'd been putting off for years, clients I wanted to work with, and finally building things, not slides. Bookkeeping was not on the list. Like most people who go independent, I figured out pretty quickly that the admin side of running a business is its own job, and that nobody is going to do it for you.

Back then Google Sheets felt like the obvious place to start. Free, flexible, already knew it inside out. And I genuinely meant to keep it tidy. That lasted about two months. In my defence, I am structured enough when the work is interesting. I am sloppy when it isn't. Bookkeeping never came close to meeting that bar.

So within a few months my receipts were everywhere. In my inbox. In my downloads. In the third drawer of my desk. In the glove compartment of a car I no longer owned by the time I went looking for them. I had a folder on my desktop called Receipts 2023. It was, mostly, empty. Go figure.

The end of every month was the same. A few hours of digging, a few hours of typing, a small voice in the back of my head asking is this really how you wanted to spend a Sunday evening. Tax season was that, multiplied. A long weekend of forensic accounting, a CPA who quietly judged me, and, if shit hit the fan, a small, expensive surprise from the tax office.

I tell people now that I didn't start a business to do bookkeeping. That gets a laugh, but it is also literally true. None of us did. And yet we all end up here.

And yet we all end up here (iykyk).

I tried them all

So I did the responsible thing and went looking for a proper setup.

Paying an actual bookkeeper was off the table. Quotes started around €200+ a month, which is a lot of money for someone in month four of a new business whose entire ask is please type my expenses into a spreadsheet. In the early days, when every euro is allocated three times over, the math just didn't work. The job was also too small and too boring to feel right about handing off. I'd rather pay someone to clean my apartment.

So I went looking for software instead. I tried QuickBooks. FreshBooks. Sevdesk. Bonsai. Wave. Xero. Pick one, I almost certainly had a subscription at some point.

Don't get me wrong, they're good products. That isn't the issue. The issue is that they were all built for accountants, or for wannabe accountants. Chart of accounts. Double-entry. Assets vs. liabilities vs. equity. P&L statements. None of it is wrong. It's all standard accounting, professionally done. It's just that I am not an accountant, and I never wanted to become one. The whole point of running a small business is that you get to choose what you spend your day on. Most accounting tools quietly assume the opposite. Which is the long way of saying: accounting software is built for accountants. The rest of us are being asked to think like one. That's the bug.

And the irony was that, despite all this functionality, these tools caused more work, not less. Now I had expenses to categorize, a customer to create, a supplier to add, records to link, and I still had to dig up the original invoices from my inbox before any of that mattered. The tool that was supposed to take work away was giving me more of it, just in a nicer UI.

Accounting software is built for accountants. The rest of us are being asked to think like one. That's the bug.

A few months in, I quietly canceled every sub and went back to spreadsheets. For what I actually needed, this was faster. People like to bash on Excel, but it is a genuinely flexible piece of software, and when your job is just write down what comes in and what goes out, very little beats a blank grid.

What no one seems to get right

But the bigger problem hadn't moved. I still didn't want to do any of it. And I wasn't going to outsource it either. Partly out of stubbornness, partly because outsourcing doesn't actually save you the worst part. You still have to find every receipt yourself before anyone else can touch it.

Every accounting tool has some version of the same tagline: spend less time on your finances and more time running your business. It's the right promise. Almost none of them keep it though. Once you actually use one, you realise "less time" mostly means "the same time, in a slightly nicer form". The typing didn't go anywhere. It just moved from point A to point B.

Outsourcing doesn't actually save you the worst part. You still have to find every receipt yourself before anyone else can touch it.

The reason, I think, is that they assume you want to handle everything yourself. The whole interface is wired so that, at the end of the month, you can produce a clean P&L and balance sheet. Everything you touch is in service of that one output – the chart of accounts, the asset and liability buckets, the customer and supplier tables, the expense...