I hate QuickBooks. It's expensive, awkward, and completely overkill for my writing business. Unfortunately for me, it's also the most usable and affordable multi-currency, multi-account invoicing tool so I've had to use it for the last four years. Then I read Craig Mod's blog about building his own custom finance tool in a week.
Mod's situation is a lot more complex than mine, but we're both dealing with multiple bank accounts in multiple currencies with a lot of moving pieces. I mostly get paid in US dollars and GBP and mostly live in euros, but I've a lot of USD business expenses, plenty of euro business expenses, and I travel regularly. Sometimes a USD expense will get paid from a euro account, sometimes a euro expense will be paid with USD, and sometimes the one USD transaction will involve both euros, and GBP. To quote Mod, "Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need."
Since QuickBooks isn't exactly cheap—the plan I'm on is €372/year—I realised that I could copy Mod's solution and build my own with Claude Code. And likewise, I now have the best piece of accounting software I've ever used.
Of course, the app kind of grew in the building. It's a complete financial dashboard for me and Hannah. It's got three key pillars:
- It does invoicing, business expense tracking, and tax prep for me.
- It gives us an overview of our monthly spending and savings.
- It tracks our assets, debt, and net worth.
And it does all of this very very visibly to encourage us to actually save, pay off the credit card, and be more fiscally responsible.
Better Business Invoicing
Me and QuickBooks had two big problems: I didn't want to work the way QuickBooks wanted me to work, and I was only using a fraction of its features. This made things a bit of a shit show. The worst problem was that I'd use QuickBooks to create an invoice for a client like Zapier and then the payment would come in from ZAPIER REF123 or something, and it wouldn't match the two. Instead, it would create a new client. Over the course of a month, I could end up with seven Zapiers in my client list. And QuickBooks offered no clean fix.
Now, I have control over client matching. There's no route for this kind of nonsense. An invoice goes out (directly from the app over SMPT) and when a matching payment hits my Wise account, it gets marked as paid. It also has one of the few QuickBooks features I love: FX gain and loss tracking.
Similarly, I can now easily track business expenses whatever account they occur in, see how much I'm earning, and estimate my tax bill for the year at any moment.
Daily Finances — The Stick
I've always been very good with money. There's never been a euro I can't spend.
And while that attitude was fun in my 20s, it seems a little bit short sighted in my 30s. I've been meaning to get a better handle on savings, set up a pension, and do all those adult things for a few years. This app is a tool to help me on the way.
By making it fully visible how much we're spending each month on the important things like the mortgage, dog food, and health insurance versus trips to the pub and Deliveroo, I'm hoping that I will shame myself into better financial decisions.
This is also the bit where Hannah's finances come in. She's got a real job so her monthly income is substantially more predictable and fixed. We operate most finances jointly, so she's got full visibility of all this and her earnings and expenses are taken into account.
One feature I'm happy with here is trip expenses. We like to travel so I've built a system that can automatically (with a bit of hand holding) tally up what we spent on a weekend in Copenhagen (too much) or a work trip to London.
Net Worth — The Carrot
If the daily expenses are meant to shame us into activity (or inactivity when it comes to the pub), the net worth view is meant to show us it paying off. It includes how much of the mortgage we've paid down, my eToro investments, and, soon, both our pensions. As the emergency fund builds, I'd also add a view for that along with some kind of runway prediction for what would happen if one of us stopped working.
While a lot of this info is in there, it's not quite working because it relies on the stick to get us acting appropriately. But I like the idea that I might one day look at this dashboard and smile.
Like Mod, I'm now software bonkers. I cannot believe how solvable AI coding tools make everyday programs. I've always been a piss poor coder with a passable understanding of how things work. It's why I've spent the past decade as a writer and not an engineer. But with tools like Claude Code and Cursor, I can build the apps I want. And most importantly, work the way I want.
Building this app for me made me realise that there are lots of other people who have some of the same problems as me, especially around multi-currency income. Not everyone needs my overbuilt setup, but there are tens of thousands of freelancers working in dollars but living in euros, rupees, pesos, bhat, and every other currency. Tracking and reconciling this shouldn't require awkward spreadsheets or software that costs a few hundred euro a year, should it?
More on this in the next blog.
