Nobody sets out to build accounting software. I ended up here the long way round: I tried four or five different systems for handling my own money, each one worked for a while, and each one had a problem I could not get past. Eventually it seemed more sensible to fix the thing properly than to keep switching.
The push to actually do it came from an unlikely place — I had been watching Starter Story on YouTube, which is hours of people explaining how their business began, and the pattern in almost every one of them is the same: they had a problem, the problem was boring and specific, and they were not the only person who had it. That last part is the whole bet. I was fairly sure my money setup was not a personal failing but a shape that a few million self-employed people are in.
In my case what I went looking for first was a book. I read a lot of personal finance — it is a genre with maybe six real ideas in it and several hundred books, but the six ideas are good ones. When I started working for myself the one I reached for was Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich, and specifically the part where he stops talking about budgets and starts talking about buckets.
The problem was never the math
Working out what you owe is not hard. A percentage of what came in, set aside, every time. Any self-employed person can describe the correct behavior in one sentence, and almost none of us do it — because the money lands in one account, undivided, and looks like yours.
That is the actual failure. Not ignorance, not laziness: a number in a bank account that is partly the government’s, partly rent and partly yours, with nothing anywhere on the screen saying which is which. You spend against the whole balance because the whole balance is what you can see.
The idea I borrowed
Sethi’s Conscious Spending Plan does not ask you to track anything. It asks you to decide, once, what share of your money goes where — roughly 50 to 60 per cent to fixed costs, 5 to 10 to investing, 5 to 10 to savings goals, and whatever is left, 20 to 35 per cent, to spend on whatever you like with no guilt attached. That last bucket is the part that makes it survivable. Every budget built on discipline eventually loses to a Friday night; a plan that has already approved the Friday night does not have to win that fight.
I called my version the freedom buckets, because that is what the last one actually buys, and I ran it by hand for as long as I could.
Where the book stops and self-employment starts
Every percentage in that plan is a percentage of take-home pay. That phrase is doing enormous quiet work. It assumes a number that arrives on a schedule, the same size each time, with tax already removed by somebody else before you ever see it.
Take that away and the system needs two changes. Tax has to become a bucket of its own, and it has to be the first one, filled before anything else is even considered — because nobody is withholding it for you and the bill arrives four times a year regardless. And the percentages cannot be applied monthly, because there is no reliable month. They have to be applied to each payment as it lands, so that a $9,000 January and a $900 March are handled by the same rule without either one requiring a decision.
That is the entire mechanic BrassWell is built on. It is not a new idea. It is a very good old one with the paycheck assumption taken out of it, which turns out to be most of the work.
What we tried first
The spreadsheet worked for a while, in the way spreadsheets do: perfectly as long as you keep feeding it, and then not at all. Two separate bank accounts worked better and lasted longer, and it is still advice worth giving — a separate business account is the highest-leverage habit available to a self-employed person and it costs nothing.
The consumer budgeting apps ran into the same wall, and it is not that they are bad — several are very good. It is that they open by asking for your monthly income, and if you are self-employed that question has no honest answer. You enter a number you made up, and then spend the year watching the app compare reality to your invention.
The small-business accounting tools have the opposite problem. They are built to produce statements for someone who will read them — a bookkeeper, a lender, a board — and they are excellent at it. When it is only you, that machinery is overhead you maintain for an audience that does not exist.
None of these are broken products. They are products built for someone slightly to the left or right of where I was standing, which is a much more common situation than software being bad.
The gap in the middle
Between a budgeting app that assumes a salary and an accounting suite that assumes a bookkeeper sits a very large number of people: sole traders, contractors, freelancers, one-van trades, single-chair salons — earning irregularly, filing quarterly, and sitting between two categories of software that were each designed with somebody else in mind.
What that group needs is narrow and specific. Money arrives; it should divide itself before you can spend it. Tax should leave the spendable balance the moment it lands. An invoice should take a minute and then chase itself. And the question can I afford this should have an answer on screen that is already net of everything owed.
That is a smaller product than accounting software and a more opinionated one than a budgeting app. It is the whole of what BrassWell does.
What we decided not to build
The shape of a product is mostly the list of things it refuses. BrassWell does not do payroll, inventory, multi-entity consolidation or double-entry ledgers, and it will not file your return for you. Each of those is a real need, and each one would pull the product toward the customer who has a bookkeeper — who is already well served, and is not who this is for.
It also does not give advice. The tax figure is an estimate against your own numbers, labeled as one. For your actual situation you want an accountant, and the app says so rather than implying otherwise.
Why it is called BrassWell
Where it is now
Early access, deliberately. The tax buckets, the invoicing and the bank connection were built first because those were the parts needed first. What gets built next is being decided by the people using it — a claim that is easy to make and easy to check: write to hello@brasswell.app and a person replies, and the company is small enough that the person is often the one who wrote the code.
Whether the guess holds is the open question. It is possible I have built a very good tool for one person. The way to find out is to put it in front of people and listen, which is what early access is for.
Looking for more?
Related guides
- How to budget on an irregular incomeThe bucket method, written out in full.
- How much to set aside for taxes when self-employedThe first bucket, and why it is first.
- QuickBooks Self-Employed alternativeIncluding where BrassWell is the wrong answer.
Elsewhere on BrassWell
- All guidesEverything we’ve written, in one place.
- Support CenterAnswers written the way these guides are.
- How BrassWell worksIncome, buckets, tax set-aside and invoicing.
- Ask us directlyA person replies, 9 AM–5 PM Pacific, Mon–Fri.