For offline book keeping there's always GnuCash[0]. It's free, open source and cross platform. I've been using it for years. It works really nicely and my accountant is always happy with how tidy things are when we go over everything.

[0]: https://www.gnucash.org/

I use gnucash as a better check register and it almost got me understanding and doing accounting... couldn't recommend it strongly enough. Wonderful package.

OP's "its a spreadsheet doing what you do" is so much more welcoming to many of those just trying to be a business. There's folks trying to see if their hobbies will pay, who can use this. If you asked them to install gnucash they'd argue that "i'm not really in it for the money" because they're that scared of attempting to learn "Accounting".

Add Integration with payment processors and it should grow like a kudzu plantation.

> Add Integration with payment processors and it should grow like a kudzu plantation.

I think part of the appeal of GnuCash is it's an offline solution that integrates with nothing. You don't need to think about another company taking all of your private financial records and selling it to advertisers behind your back for profit.

Something like payment processor integration would require you to always be in a position to accept webhooks from your payment processor, which means standing up a web server. But if you really wanted to do this behavior you could likely pull it off without that. You could write a script that downloads your payment gateway's CSV files every day and write an app that imports that into GnuCash.

But honestly, that seems like overkill. Payment gateways will send you a 1099 every year with a monthly breakdown, so it only takes a few minutes to get these numbers into GnuCash.

I use GnuCash to manage my business in a similar way to spreadsheets. I mean, each GnuCash "account" is like a different spreadsheet sheet and you just add transactions to it. The only difference is you also have a column for where those funds get added to or removed from, but GnuCash can be configured to default to a specific account and then suddenly you barely have to think about the double-entry aspect of it.

I personally also like software that allows you to become a power user. GnuCash is one of them, but unfortunately not accessible to the vast majority of people –- too nerdy :P (not a criticism!).

Most people don't want to learn accounting tbh, not even that – they hate doing it.

> Most people don't want to learn accounting tbh, not even that – they hate doing it.

How is it accounting tho? If anything it could be classified as tracking your income and expenses, but you would be doing that with a spreadsheet too.

I wrote about GnuCash a few years ago at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-gnucash-as-a-freelancer...

But there's a screenshot in there near the middle showing how I tally up costs for Netflix. It's pretty much exactly like a spreadsheet. In a way it's even easier than a spreadsheet because a lot of columns are auto-filled out for you like the dates and all of the totals get auto-calculated for you. It takes like 3 seconds to make a new entry.

Hey – thanks for this. That's exactly right, the phase of switching from spreadsheets to a double-entry accounting software should not be painful.

With WeKeep you can continue recording stuff as you were doing in a spreadsheet, but your accountant can also do more advanced journal entries where needed (e.g. record equity, accrue expenses, write off bad debt, ...).

Thanks for the feedback! That's right, this is a cloud-based app. Mind if I ask, why was your experience poor with Quickbooks?

Quickbooks sent me over the edge when they forced me to buy a new version - they made the old version stop working.

On top of that it comes with all kinds of crap I will never use. I use it because my accountants are (were) simpletons who only knew that.

All that stuff on the main screen with the arrows.. while I appreciate an attempt at a GUI ( I usually prefer) I don't need any of those things and they waste space on the screen and cognitive time sorting them.

I had bought the pro software years ago, non-cloud. They bricked it, forced to buy again, and kept pushing for the cloud option. I hate cloud options.

I did enough QB learning to find it's possible to take a spreadsheet and import expenses.. I almost started doing that instead of buying the new software so it could download from my banks.

If I used the payroll stuff I could see paying to update - otherwise it's just a huge program downloads a csv from my bank and puts a few same expenses in columns to export to my accountant - at least for me, and it's over priced for that.

I would make custom GUI screens for different businesses and have a preview with one-click change - if a business does not use the software for invoicing, take all that crap off the screen and put it behind a menu - this could make graphics larger and simpler.

I would have totally different GUI's for a conststruction business compared to a hair stylist compared to a dentist compared to web dev.. sometimes I think of these things and sigh.

So.. export to a format that accountants can use, sadly needs to be a thing that is prioritized.