I run two small businesses as a sole trader. Every few months, tax time rolls around and I'm digging through bank statements trying to figure out what I spent and where it came from.
I tried Xero. I tried ZipBooks. They're fine tools, but they felt like more than I needed. I just need to know how much came in, how much went out, and what I'm making on each project.
The problem was simple: I kept forgetting to log things because the accounting app was one more tab I never opened.
How I actually track things
My system is low-tech on purpose.
Invoices go to Gmail with a label. Every invoice I send or receive gets tagged. When I need to find one, I search the label. That's it.
Bank statements get downloaded quarterly. Four PDFs a year. I thought about connecting a bank API, but honestly, four downloads a year isn't worth the complexity or the security risk of giving a third-party app access to my bank account.
Project files stay local on my machine. Client work, scripts, anything sensitive. Not in the cloud, not in a shared drive. Simple and controlled.
The missing piece was somewhere to see the full picture: earnings, expenses, profit per project, and deductions at tax time.
Notion is where I already work
My projects, clients, notes, even this portfolio all live in Notion. So I asked myself a pretty obvious question: why not put my accounting there too?
I wanted a database with income and expenses in one place. Each entry tagged with a date, amount, category, which business it belongs to, and whether it's tax deductible. Nothing fancy.
Claude Code did the boring part
I opened Claude Code, described what I needed, and it wrote three small scripts for me.
The first one set up the database structure in Notion. The second one took my bank statement data and sorted each transaction into the right category. Software subscriptions, transport, client payments, all mapped automatically. The third one keeps it updated when I get new statements.
The whole thing took an afternoon. Most of that time was me deciding on categories, not writing code.
What I actually use now
I open Notion and I can see everything I need. Income by client. Expenses by category. Profit per project. Total earnings by financial year. When my accountant needs numbers, I export a view and send it over. No spreadsheet cleanup.
It's not a product. It's not even particularly clever. It's just my data, in the place I already look every day, organised the way I think about it.
Why this worked
The simplest answer: I stopped trying to use the "right" tool and used the one I actually open. I didn't automate everything. I didn't connect APIs to my bank. I kept the parts that are easy to do manually (downloading four statements a year, labelling emails) and only automated the part that was actually painful (sorting and categorising transactions).
Sometimes the best solution isn't a new app. It's making the tools you already have do one more thing.
