Why I Built Aqounta

Receipts came from everywhere.

Paper receipts from restaurants, taxis, trains and parking.

PDFs from emails.

Confirmation emails.

Photos taken on a phone.

I put them all into a folder.

That worked until I had to find something.

A folder full of IMG_2043.jpg and Scan_001.pdf files isn't much of a system.

So I invented a naming convention.

2019-03-14_14-32.pdf

Date and time.

Sortable.

Tidy.

Automatic.

It looked organised.

But it didn't tell me anything useful.

I knew when I'd saved the receipt.

I didn't know which client it belonged to.

I didn't know how much it was.

I didn't know whether I'd billed it.

I'd solved storage.

I hadn't solved the actual problem.

The folder could store the documents.

The spreadsheet could store the information.

So every receipt became a row:

Date.

Client.

Description.

Amount.

Excel did the totals.

When it was time to invoice, I copied the total into a Word template.

Again, it worked.

Until the numbers changed.

Now there were two versions of the truth.

The spreadsheet said one thing.

The invoice said another.

Miss a receipt.

Correct an amount.

Add something later.

Nothing breaks loudly.

The two numbers just stop matching.

That's what I started to notice about this kind of work.

The problem isn't that it's difficult.

The problem is that the same information gets entered over and over again.

And every time you enter something twice, you've created an opportunity for it to be wrong.

Google Drive genuinely made things better.

We could take a photo of a receipt on a phone and save it immediately.

A PDF could go straight into the folder.

No waiting until we were back at a computer.

The friction went down.

Exactly what I wanted.

But then the spreadsheet grew.

It became Google Sheets.

Then came the formulas.

A SUMIF here.

Another one there.

One per client.

One per month.

One to find things that hadn't been billed.

Eventually there were cells I was afraid to touch.

Including some I'd written myself.

I'd started by trying to automate the work.

Now I was maintaining the system I'd built to manage the work.

Every period, the accountant needed the files.

Receipts.

Invoices.

Supporting documents.

And then came the question I hated:

Which ones had I already sent?

There was no good answer.

I'd search through emails.

Check folders.

Look at previous attachments.

Try to remember whether a particular receipt had already gone over.

Sometimes I'd send something twice.

Sometimes I'd leave something out.

Sometimes I'd spend more time figuring out whether I'd sent a file than it would have taken to send it again.

The files were there.

The problem was knowing their status.

Had I received it?

Had I tagged it to a client?

Had I included it in an invoice?

Had I already sent it to the accountant?

The file itself couldn't tell me.

And once again, I was relying on folders, spreadsheets and memory to keep track of something that should have been obvious.

The end of the month.

During the month, everything felt manageable.

Three weeks later, it became detective work.

A coffee receipt.

Was that a client meeting?

Or just a coffee?

A taxi on a Thursday.

Which client was I visiting?

A train ticket.

Which project was that for?

Some were easy.

Some weren't.

And when we couldn't work it out, the expense didn't get billed.

We paid for it ourselves.

That was the frustrating part.

The receipt wasn't lost.

It was right there.

The file existed.

The date existed.

The amount existed.

Everything existed except the one thing that made the receipt useful:

the context.

Which client was this for?

Why did we spend this money?

Had it been billed?

Had it been sent to the accountant?

That information lived somewhere else.

In a spreadsheet.

In an email.

In a folder.

Or, worst of all, in someone's memory.

I had spent years trying to organise files better.

That wasn't the problem.

Google Drive was already very good at storing files.

The problem was that a file doesn't know what it means.

A receipt can tell you:

€38.40.

It can't tell you:

This was lunch with Client X, it belongs to project Y, it hasn't been billed yet, and the accountant hasn't received it.

That's information about the file.

And I'd been trying to cram that information into filenames, folders and spreadsheets.

That's when I realised:

The documents weren't the problem. The information around the documents was.

That became Aqounta.

Aqounta doesn't need to replace the storage system you already have.

Your documents can stay in your own Google Drive.

Aqounta keeps the information around them organised.

Which client?

How much?

What date?

What is it for?

Has it been billed?

Has it been sent to the accountant?

What is still missing?

The file remains a file.

The context becomes data.

And once you separate those two things, the whole workflow becomes much simpler.

You don't need three copies of the same receipt.

You don't need a clever filename.

You don't need a spreadsheet full of formulas nobody wants to touch.

You don't need to remember what you did three weeks ago.

I also wanted Aqounta to fit into the way we already work.

Take a photo.

Drag and drop.

Upload a file.

Forward an email.

Use your phone's share sheet.

That's it.

Because I've learned something from doing this for years:

Every extra step is an invitation to procrastinate.

If you can tag a receipt while you're still standing outside the restaurant, you probably will.

If you have to wait until the end of the month and reconstruct the entire story from a folder full of PDFs, you probably won't.

And that's the difference I wanted Aqounta to make.

Not better filing.

Less remembering.

You're standing outside a restaurant after a client meeting.

You have the receipt in your hand.

You take a photo.

You tag it to the client.

Done.

Three weeks later, you don't have to remember the meeting.

You don't have to search six folders.

You don't have to open a spreadsheet.

You don't have to wonder whether you billed it.

You don't have to wonder whether the accountant already has it.

The information is already there.

That's what I wanted to build.

A system that captures the context while you still have it.

So that the end of the month isn't a reconstruction exercise.

Aqounta is open and free to use today.

I built it to solve a problem I had myself.

A problem that started with a folder and a filename, grew into a spreadsheet, then became a collection of folders, emails and things I had to remember.

Eventually I realised I didn't need a better filing system.

I needed a system that understood the things I was filing.

That's Aqounta.

Keep your files. Add the context. Stop reconstructing the month.

If you try it, tell me what's missing.

I read all the feedback.

Because the goal isn't to build another system you have to maintain.

It's to make expenses boring.

And honestly, boring is exactly what I want them to be.