My bookkeeping stack costs 30 EUR a month and runs on four tools.
I spend 15 minutes a week on receipts and 60 minutes monthly closing books.
The whole routine takes 90 minutes a month and replaces a 200 EUR bookkeeper.
Yearly handoff to my tax advisor takes one afternoon, fully sorted by category.
I run a one-person studio. For the first year, my bookkeeping was a folder called "receipts maybe" and a spreadsheet I opened twice. That stopped working when monthly income crossed four figures and my tax advisor asked, politely, why nothing was categorized. Here is the stack and the routine that replaced the chaos.
The Stack: 4 Tools, ~30 EUR a Month
I use four tools, total monthly cost about 30 EUR. That is cheaper than a single hour with a bookkeeper, and the stack does 90 percent of what a bookkeeper would charge me 200 EUR a month for.
Tool one is my business banking account. Separate from personal, no exceptions. I picked one with a clean export (CSV and PDF), a virtual card for online subscriptions, and an API. Cost is 0 to 10 EUR depending on the plan. The single most important habit I built was never paying business expenses from my personal account, even when traveling. One mixed transaction creates an hour of cleanup later.
Tool two is a receipts app, Dext. It lets me snap a photo, auto-extracts vendor, date, amount, VAT, and matches it to the bank line. Cost is around 20 EUR per month for solo plans. I tried free alternatives. They saved me 20 EUR and cost me 4 hours of typing every month. Bad trade.
Tool three is a Notion ledger. One database. Columns: date, vendor, category, amount, VAT amount, project, paid status. I built it once, took 30 minutes, and it has not changed in 18 months. Cost is 0 EUR if you already use Notion, otherwise free tier works. It is not the books, it is the index. The books live in Dext and the bank.
Tool four is an invoicing tool. I use a lightweight one with recurring invoices, automatic VAT logic, and a customer-facing payment link. Cost is around 8 EUR per month. I do not use a free invoice generator anymore. I lost two payments to broken PDF links before I bit the bullet.
Total: roughly 30 EUR per month. Replaces a part-time bookkeeper. Pays itself back the first time I avoid a late-payment fee.
Weekly: 15 Minutes of Receipts and Tagging
Every Friday, end of day, I spend 15 minutes on the same routine. I set a timer. If I am not done in 15 minutes, I stop and finish next week. Friction kills routines, so I keep this short.
Step one: open my email and forward every receipt that came in that week to the Dext inbox address. Stripe, hosting, software subscriptions, the lot. Dext processes them within minutes. This is 3 minutes of work.
Step two: open my phone, scroll through the camera roll, snap any paper receipts I forgot, and upload them to Dext. Coffee meetings, hardware, books. If I am not sure whether something is a business expense, I upload it anyway and decide during the monthly review. 4 minutes.
Step three: open the bank app, scan the week's transactions, and tag anything that needs context. I do not categorize yet. I just leave a one-line note ("client X retainer", "annual domain renewal", "client lunch"). Future me will thank present me. 5 minutes.
Step four: open the Notion ledger, log any invoice I sent that week, and mark any incoming payments as received. I check overdue invoices. If anything is more than 7 days late, I send a friendly nudge from the invoicing tool. 3 minutes.
That is it. 15 minutes, weekly, non-negotiable. The whole thing works because I never let receipts pile up. A week of receipts is 10 to 20 items. A month of receipts is 60 to 80 items, and that is where solo founders give up and pay someone 200 EUR to dig them out.
I do not skip this even on weeks with low activity. The habit matters more than the volume. A 5-minute Friday is fine. A skipped Friday breaks the chain.
Monthly: 60 Minutes of Reconciliation and a P&L
First Sunday of the month, 60 minutes, coffee and a clean desk. This is the only "real" bookkeeping work I do, and it is the part most solo founders dread. Done weekly-prep first, this is calm.
Minutes 1 to 20: reconciliation. I open Dext and the bank export side by side. Every bank line should have a matched receipt. Anything unmatched gets fixed: either I find the missing receipt, or I categorize it as "no receipt, business expense, [reason]" with a screenshot of the email confirmation. Roughly 5 percent of lines end up here, and that is fine for a tax advisor as long as it is documented.
Minutes 20 to 40: categorization. Every transaction gets a category. I use about 12 categories: income, software, hardware, hosting, contractors, marketing, education, travel, meals, office, fees, taxes. Twelve is the sweet spot. Fewer and the P&L is useless. More and I spend 20 minutes deciding whether a Notion subscription is "software" or "office".
Minutes 40 to 55: VAT handling. I run a small filter in the ledger that sums VAT collected (from invoices) and VAT paid (from expenses). The difference is what I owe or get back. I do not file the VAT myself, my tax advisor does, but I send the number monthly so there are no surprises at quarter end. This took me a year to set up and now takes 5 minutes a month.
Minutes 55 to 60: the P&L snapshot. One page. Money in this month, expenses by category, net profit, runway in months. Saved as a PDF, dropped in a shared Notion page my tax advisor can read. Monthly income swings between 200 and 1200 EUR depending on the month, and seeing that pattern in a graph is what changed my pricing decisions in 2026.
After 60 minutes, I close the laptop. The books are clean for another month.
Yearly: How I Hand Off Cleanly to My Tax Advisor
Once a year, in January, I do a 3-hour close. That is the only time the bookkeeping costs me a real chunk of a day, and it is because the rest of the year was tidy.
Step one: export everything. Bank statements (12 months, PDF and CSV). Dext export of all receipts (one ZIP). Invoicing tool export of all invoices sent and paid. Notion ledger as CSV. Total time: 20 minutes.
Step two: a 30-minute self-audit. I open the P&L for each month and check totals add up. I look for outliers ("why was March software spending double?") and I add a one-line note. The notes save my tax advisor from emailing me 14 questions in February. Each note costs me 30 seconds and saves 15 minutes of back-and-forth.
Step three: I write a one-page summary. Total income, expense categories with totals, big purchases (anything over 500 EUR with a depreciation note), VAT collected, VAT paid, anything weird. This is the document my tax advisor actually reads. The 200 pages of receipts are backup.
Step four: I drop the whole package in a shared folder and send my tax advisor one email with three bullet points. They reply within a week with their fee for the year (usually around 600 EUR for my volume) and a list of any clarifications. I have never had more than 3 questions in 2 years of doing it this way.
Step five: I file the previous year's package as read-only and do not touch it again. The tax advisor handles the filing. I get a copy of the final return in March or April. Done.
Total yearly time: about 4 hours, including emails. Total yearly cost (advisor plus tools): around 960 EUR. For a solo studio that touches 5 figures of income, this is the cheapest insurance I buy.
Bottom Line
Solo bookkeeping is not hard. It is just unforgiving when you skip weeks. Four tools, 30 EUR a month, 90 minutes of work, and a tax advisor who only sees the clean version. That is the whole system. The math works because the weekly 15 minutes prevents the monthly 4-hour panic, and the monthly close prevents the yearly meltdown.
If you are a solo founder still running on a folder called "receipts maybe", pick one tool this week. The receipts app first, because that is where the most time leaks out. Set the Friday timer. Do it for 4 weeks. The habit will hold long before the spreadsheet does.
I write more about how I run a one-person AI studio at raxxo.shop, and what I am working on this month lives on the /now page. Books closed, back to building.
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