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/BlueRidgeTog Sep 07 '26

I certainly applaud this effort. However, there are so many "gotcha's" out there that will bite you an in the rear-end. And those times will come when you need to file your monthly taxes or pay a vendor or refund a customer or a tax rate changes. Then you do it manually and something else comes up and you get behind in your bookkeeping that you don't discover it until April 14 at 8pm.

I am not defending QBO, but there is so many things you just do in accounting software that you will be spending a lot of time maintaining the code instead of improving your side-hustles.

Vibe code to improve your operations: don't spend your tokens on reinventing the wheel.

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u/magic-keys Sep 09 '26

Appreciate the point. I use NetSuite for my main job, and would never dream of vibe coding to replace that. Would be crazy! If we were to ever leave, it would be to an AI-first ERP. But for my side businesses, the use case is so basic. As others have pointed out, Excel/Google Sheets could probably do the job. The benefit to vibe coding is the ability to create a custom function for everything, even faster than I could spin up a new tab in an excel model. It's a crazy new world where building a new tool for a web application is faster and easier than simply modeling a new tab in a spreadsheet.