Chapter one
Tired of renting our own numbers.
My wife and I are both self-employed, and for years we did what everyone does: we paid QuickBooks, every month. The overhead, the bloat, the price — all just to reach our own finances, which lived with a corporation whose real incentive is selling subscriptions.
At some point it stopped making sense that looking at our own money cost rent. Tadbooks started with that question.
It began as a spreadsheet.
The first Tadbooks wasn't an app at all — it was the simple profit-and-loss spreadsheet we ran our books on. I figured I could rebuild it as a little web-style app with a proper way to save, and skip the subscription entirely. Once saving worked, friends and family started looking over my shoulder: add this, and I'd switch too.
A year and some change later, here we are. I never pictured myself building bookkeeping software — but the thought of other people cutting a subscription and shrinking the overhead on their dream business, or even a side hobby, made me want to see it through to the end.
Why a frog? Easy.
My wife likes frogs. That's it — that's the story. Some decisions in a family business are simple.
Fun fact: Tadbooks nearly shipped as AuditThis! — a much more sarcastic jab at the proverbial Man. Its logo starred a disgruntled businessman, deeply displeased that we were launching the app that made him less money. He didn't survive the rebrand. Tad — calmer, greener, and firmly on your side — did.
Yours, like it should be.
Tadbooks is what bookkeeping software looks like when it's built for the person using it: one price, no account, no cloud, and a small green bookkeeper who's always in your corner.