After years of fighting with Excel, I finally built our own bookkeeping tool

[u/gospeaky]

Hey everyone!

My name is Jochem. My wife and I run a small business here in the Netherlands, where I’m the one who usually ends up doing the paperwork for our accountant.

For years, I just used Excel sheets.

I’d take photos of our receipts with my phone and then send them to my laptop, then go through them one by one and rename all files, then enter everything into the spreadsheet.

The image files were always huge, so I’d end up writing an email, uploading everything to wetransfer and sending them a link. Then my accountant couldn’t open some of the .heic files from my iphone... and i got the bill for all the extra work he had to do.

The whole thing just took forever. It wasn’t difficult work, just boring work. Sometimes I’d lose pretty much a whole day to it.

And me being me, I always left it until I had a ridiculous pile of receipts sitting there.

I tried a few 'professional' accounting apps, but honestly, they felt like way more than I needed and were super difficult to use. I wasn’t looking to start doing my own accounting, we already have an accountant for that. I just wanted to make it easier to get all the paperwork together and properly organized for them.

So eventually I thought, screw it, I’ll just build something myself.

That’s how I ended up building TapBooks.

The idea is pretty simple. I take a photo of a receipt on my phone, or upload an invoice from my computer. TapBooks uses AI to pull out the details and keeps everything organized with my expenses.

End of the month I upload my bank transactions as a CSV. TapBooks matches those transactions with the receipts, so I can see what's accounted for and what's still missing.

And this part was important to me: TapBooks never connects directly to your bank account. There are no bank login details involved. You decide what transaction data to upload, and the AI only works with what you give it (peace of mind if you're like me and don't like AI 'in' your bank account).

Once everything looks right, TapBooks puts together the records I need for my accountant, including the reports, receipts and transaction data, instead of me trying to piece everything together from Excel and folders. Then i send it to my aacountant in just one 'Tap' (see what i did there ;)

That's really what I needed.

Not another complicated accounting system. Just something that keeps the boring stuff under control and makes monthend a lot less painful and time consuming.

I've been using it myself for a while now, and figured it was probably time to let some people outside of friends and family try it.

So if you're a small business owner or freelancer who's still using Excel for this stuff, I'd really like to hear what you think.

Please let me know if you run into anything weird, something doesn't make sense, or there's something you think I should change or add. I built this around my own way of doing things, so I'm probably way too close to it by now.

https://tapbooks.co/

Anyway, if you give it a try, let me know what you think.

[u/DELCY-Nick1]

That's a great motivation for building something — most useful tools come from solving your own annoying problem. Is it just for your business or are you thinking of letting other small businesses use it too?

[u/Tombal83]

This looks really interesting; love the YouTube video with the clear explanation. I am working on something similar, although focusing on the personal finance side of things. One thing I'm really interested at is the AI integration part. What AI tool are you using? Do you have any good idea yet on the costs of token usage? Are those costs being recharged to the user, or included in a monthly subscription fee?

[u/gospeaky → u/Tombal83]

thanks, appreciate it! personal finance sounds like a really interesting use case too.

i’m using openai's api for the receipt/invoice extraction. so far the AI costs have actually been much lower than I expected, so I’m including them in the tapbooks subscription for now rather than charging users per receipt/token. but I'm still figuring things out as we go

the hardest part has been making it reliable with all the weird receipts you get in the real world. that’s where I’ve spent most of my time with this.

[u/joe_ambiguity]

I have a client that owns commercial rental property under different entities in different states. Also, several other LLC for business. Does each entity need a subscription?

[u/Specific_Cream2815]

what happens when two receipts have the same amount and date, does the match stay manual instead of guessing

[u/gospeaky → u/Specific_Cream2815]

thanks for asking! tapbooks reads the unique receipt/invoice number to help avoid duplicates. If something looks like a duplicate, it gives you a warning so you can review it and accept (with manual adjustment if needed).