Things we think, mostly about money as text.
Long-form. For what shipped and when, the build log is the honest surface.
-
QuickBooks alternatives that let you keep your own data
Everyone claims you own your data. The test is whether you can read it, take it, and keep working — without the vendor's cooperation, and after you have stopped paying them.
-
Getting a bank CSV into double-entry books
What actually happens between a bank export and a set of balanced books — column mapping, sign conventions, the running-balance trap, and why duplicates are the hard part.
-
What double-entry actually means, in five minutes
Double-entry is not an accounting technique you have to learn. It is one rule — every transaction touches two places and the two cancel out — and everything else is names for the places.
-
Bookkeeping when you bank in three countries
Multi-currency accounting is not one number converted at the end. It is a rate, on a date, from a source, recorded at the moment the money moved — which is why spreadsheets stop working first here.
-
Why your bookkeeping is behind, and what actually fixes it
You are not behind because bookkeeping is hard. You are behind because it is a queue of small decisions, and a queue of decisions is the one kind of work that cannot be done in a burst of willpower.
-
Every change to your books is a commit you can read
Countbean stores your accounts as a plain-text Beancount ledger in a git repository, so every change an agent makes is a diff you can review and revert.
-
Reconciling a month without a spreadsheet
Reconciliation is one claim: on this date, this account held this much. In a plain-text ledger that claim is a single line, and it either passes or it fails loudly.
-
What to hand your accountant at year end
An accountant does not want your shoebox and does not want your login. They want four documents, a list of the things you were unsure about, and a way to ask you one question.
Nothing matches that.