The first screen of almost every personal finance or small business app is the same. Pick your bank, type in the credentials you use to move real money, and trust a company you met thirty seconds ago with read access to every transaction you have ever made. I kept reaching that screen and closing the tab.
It was not paranoia so much as arithmetic. A bank connection is the most sensitive permission a piece of software can ask for, and it is usually asked for first, before the product has shown it is worth anything. The convenience is real. So is the cost, and it is paid in a currency most people never see on an invoice.
What I actually needed
I work across clients, currencies and projects, and what I needed was boring: a record of what came in, what went out and what is coming. A place where a receipt photographed at a counter becomes an entry I can trust, where an invoice paid in dollars sits next to one paid in rand without either being rounded into a lie, and where my side work does not bleed into my main work.
Spreadsheets got me most of the way. They also asked me to be the parser, the reminder and the dashboard, and I was bad at all three by the end of most months.
The rule the product is built on
myClerkBook should never ask you for something it does not need.
Everything else follows from that sentence. There is no bank connection, no aggregator and no facility to add one later, because a setting can be switched on and an architecture cannot. Entries arrive because you typed them, because a document you handed over was read and you confirmed what it found, or because you imported a statement you exported yourself. The book only knows what you chose to tell it.
- Parsing reads receipts, invoices and statement exports, and nothing is saved until you confirm it.
- Each entry keeps the currency it happened in, across 166 of them, and the book reads in the one you think in.
- Separate dashboards keep separate work apart, each with its own categories and base currency.
- Smart Insights send the summary to you by email, SMS or WhatsApp, so you do not have to remember to look.
Why a book, and not a budget
Budgeting apps are built around a plan and the distance from it. That is useful, and it is not what I was missing. I was missing a clean record: something I could hand to an accountant in March, search for a client payment in July, or read at a glance on the last day of the month. A book of account is older and plainer than a budget, and it ages better.
That is also why myClerkBook does not pretend to be accounting software. It does not file anything, it does not produce statutory statements, and it does not give advice. It keeps the record well, so that the people who do those things have something good to work from.
Why I'm doing it alone
myClerkBook is one person and no investors. That shapes the product more than any feature list. There is nobody to answer to who would benefit from your data being worth more than your subscription, and nobody pushing for a growth trick that trades your attention for a chart. The only way this works is if people pay for it because it is useful, which is the incentive I want to live inside.
It also means I write the comparisons myself, I say where another product is the better choice, and when something does not exist yet the site does not describe it as if it does.
If that sounds like the tool you have been looking for, start a Ledger and tell me what is missing. I read every message.