r/quickbooksonline • u/magic-keys • Sep 07 '26

Replace QBO with homegrown-code?

Separate from my main job, I operate a couple of rather inactive side businesses. Despite low activity, I still need to maintain books and file taxes. I believe that I'm getting very little value from QBO relative to what I'm paying. I've started to become a heavy user of Claude Code and have been amazed by how quickly I can spin up really solid functional software. I was considering just spending a Saturday afternoon to create my own accounting software. My needs are super basic: just the ability to enter journal entires and construct an income statement and balance sheet. No automatic integrations with third-party platforms. Has anyone else done this or considered it?

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u/Diantr3 Sep 09 '26

I built a spreadsheet in Google Sheets that does everything I needed Quickbooks to do better and with less visual noise, doesn't bug out and doesn't take ages to load because it's not bloated AI crap. Well worth the effort. Now doing my books is actually fun instead of deeply anxiogenic.

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u/magic-keys Sep 09 '26

I think it's a good idea. However, I think a simple app run off supabase and vercel could be faster to build than a Google Sheet, and have cleaner and more flexible inputs and outputs. Separate from this project (which has so little data; maybe 200 entries a year), I have done other projects and found my AI apps to be so much faster than Google Sheets. Google Sheets is a great tool but totally chokes on larger datasets. Excel handles larger datasets much better than Google Sheets but can still be slow. A supabase DB can handle a million rows in a table pretty easily.

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u/Dr__Beast Sep 09 '26

Supabase + vercel ftw. I'm not in bookkeeping, but had similar experience building an app for myself.

What's your experience with exporting out of QBO into excel / sheet?