Your Books Belong in Your Drive, Not in Someone's Database
The Bookkeeper keeps your entire accounting system as plain text files in a folder in your own Google Drive. Free forever, open source, readable in any editor, shareable with one click.
Every accounting product makes the same quiet trade. You get software, they get custody of your records. Cancel the subscription, lose the account, or watch the company pivot, and suddenly your own financial history is behind someone else's login.
The Bookkeeper refuses that trade. The product's entire storage layer is a folder in your own Google Drive. Not a sync, not a backup, not an export feature. The folder is the database.
What Lives in the Folder
- One plain text ledger file per year, human readable, in a format compatible with the open source plain text accounting ecosystem
- An append-only log of every edit, each entry stamped with who made it, which is how the audit trail and safe multi-user editing work
- The categorization rules your books have learned from you
Open any of these files in Notepad or TextEdit and you can read your own books. That is the whole point. Software formats rot; text is forever.
What This Buys You
No hostage risk. Revoke the app in your Google settings and it is locked out instantly, while you keep everything. No breach honeypot. There is no central database of everyone's books to steal, because there is no central database at all. Free sharing. Inviting your accountant is a Drive share under the hood, so access control lives in your Google settings, not in a seat-pricing table.
Still a Real Accounting System
Plain files do not mean primitive books. Underneath is proper double entry accounting: a Balance Sheet that provably balances, Cash Flow that reconciles to the bank, receivables that age by customer, and drill-down from any report number to the entry behind it. The files are simple; the accounting is not.
Questions
What exactly appears in my Drive?
A folder named The Bookkeeper containing one ledger file per year in plain text, an append-only log of every edit with who made it, and a small file of learned categorization rules. You can open all of it in any text editor.
What Google permission does it need?
The narrowest one that exists, called drive.file. The app can only see files it created itself. It cannot read the rest of your Drive, your Gmail, or anything else.
Is Google Drive safe enough for financial records?
Your books inherit whatever protection your Google account has, including two factor authentication and Google's infrastructure. That is typically far stronger than a small vendor's database, and unlike a vendor, you can revoke access in one click.
Can I really leave at any time?
Yes, and leaving requires no export. The files in your Drive are already the canonical books, in a format the open source accounting ecosystem reads today.
Feel It Before You Trust It
Open the demo books right now. No sign up, no card, nothing to undo. Free forever.
Play With the Demo Books