#Slowbooks Pro 2026

A personal bookkeeping application raised from the ashes of QuickBooks 2003 Pro.

Free, source-available, and complete: double-entry accounting, unlimited invoicing, US payroll with tamper-evident tax forms, perpetual inventory, bank feeds, analytics — with every record in local files you control. No cloud, no account, no telemetry, no caps, no paid tiers. Multi-user Server Edition is built into the same signed installer — no Docker required (Docker remains an optional path for Linux servers).

Get started: Windows installer · macOS DMG · Docker / Linux · slowbookspro.com

One free product, two shapes: your desktop — or the whole office from one PC.

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#The Story

I ran QuickBooks 2003 Pro for 14 years for side-business invoicing and bookkeeping. Then the hard drive died. Intuit's activation servers have been dead since ~2017, so the software can't be reinstalled. The license I paid for is worthless.

So I built my own replacement, and transferred my data out of the old .QBW file using IIF export/import. Early versions wore the grief openly — the code was annotated with invented "decompilation" comments referencing QBW32.EXE offsets and Btrieve table layouts as a tribute to software that served me well until its maker decided it should stop working. The codebase has since grown up; the last of those comments came out in v2.14.0, and the fiction now lives only in this origin story. The software never depended on it.

This is an independent, from-scratch reimplementation. No Intuit source code or binaries were available, decompiled, or used.

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#Accessibility

SlowBooks Pro strives to conform to WCAG 2.1 AA: labelled controls, real dialogs, live notifications, AA contrast in both themes, and every generated PDF tagged (PDF/UA-1) so tax forms read to a screen reader. Details, known gaps and how to report a barrier: docs/accessibility.md.

#What's New

v2.16 — The year at a glance. Two new overview cards, both opt-in under Customize: P&L: Year to Date with cumulative net by month, and a Balance Sheet Trend over the last twelve month-ends that balances at every point and agrees with the report. Contributed by @jarvis4openclaw (#166). The chart of accounts import offers a CSV template.

v2.15 — Your chart, from your file. Import a chart of accounts from a CSV in the export's own columns, any spreadsheet with Number / Name / Type, or hledger's account list — tested against files hledger itself wrote. A dry run shows every row's fate first. Accounts you already have take the file's names, including the control accounts the software posts to by number, renamed in place and never duplicated, so every document still finds its account. Asked for by @tresero (#139, #161).

v2.14 — In and out of a company, and the terms once. Opening the app lands in your last company. Sign out, a new Switch company button and Choose a different company on the sign-in screen return to the company picker instead of the same password prompt, which used to mean closing the program. A multi-user install lists the users at sign-in. The first launch shows the short form of the license once, and the Windows installer shows the full license with an accept step — the first release under LICENSE 2.0.

Full history, with the reasoning behind each change, in CHANGELOG.md; the same entries with the test count per release at slowbookspro.com/changelog.

Nonprofit mode: one switch in Settings, and a church, a club or a PTO sees its own words on every screen and every printed page.

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#Wait — it does that?

Cryptographically tamper-evident tax forms. Every W-2, W-3, 940, and 941 PDF carries a SHA-256 content hash and audit ID printed in the footer. An auditor can recompute the hash and confirm the form hasn't been edited since generation, against the local document_audits chain. Not a watermark — a verification trail.

Bring-your-own-AI, including your own gateway. AI Insights runs against any of eight providers (xAI Grok, Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, Google Gemini, a Cloudflare Worker you host yourself, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you name) — keys encrypted at rest with versioned, rotatable ciphertext. And the whole app is agent-operable: every install serves a self-documenting local REST API (507 operations in v2.16) — point Claude Code or any agentic CLI at it; the AI setup guide has the paste-prompt.

One-click reseller-permit verification. Per-state format validation (WA/CA/TX), one click opens the state's official lookup, and the who-and-when verification trail lands on the customer record.

Boots refuse to lie to you. Dev and debug containers run the frontend↔backend wiring audit before uvicorn binds the port — drift between the JS and the routes fails the boot instead of 404-ing mid-feature. Release images gate on the same check in CI.

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#What it does

Full catalog in docs/features.md. Highlights:

• Accounts receivable — invoices, estimates, payments with multi-invoice allocation, credit memos, recurring schedules, batch payments, Quick Entry for paper backlogs
• Accounts payable — purchase orders, bills, bill payments, vendor credits, AP aging
• Double-entry core — auto + manual journals, closing-date enforcement, automatic audit log, 50-account contractor chart
• Banking — the register is the ledger (entries post, feeds are a review queue, reconciliation over ledger lines), transfers, deposits, check printing, OFX/QFX + Bank of America/Chase/PayPal CSV import with dedup, SimpleFIN bank feeds, shared auto-categorization rules
• Reports & tax — P&L (plain & by Class), Balance Sheet, Trial Balance, agings, GL, Cash Flow, Sales Tax with pay-to-government flow, Schedule C, printable PDF pack
• Payroll & HR — full US module with W-2/W-3/940/941, deductions, garnishments, PTO, onboarding, and a token-accessed employee portal (docs/payroll-hr-module.md)
• Inventory — perpetual ledger, weighted-average cost, automatic COGS, reorder points
• Analytics + AI — 8 live metrics, 90-day cash forecast, optional BYOK insights
• Server Edition — users, roles, attributed audit trail, serves the office from one PC, built into the same signed installer (docs/server-edition.md)
• Bank feeds — SimpleFIN: you hold the bank credential, no middleman server (docs/setup-bank-feeds.md)
• Jobs & job costing — Customer:Job on every form, cost codes and types with burden, time posted at loaded rates, budget vs actual
• Receipt intake — scan a photo or PDF into a Bill, Expense or Sales Receipt with the OCR built into macOS and Windows (Tesseract on Linux)
• Online payments — Stripe, PayPal, Square behind one abstraction, desktop-mode recording included
• Interop & migration — QuickBooks IIF round-trip incl. sales receipts (docs/migrate-from-quickbooks.md), QBO OAuth sync, Migrate Data for Xero / MYOB / Sage 50 / Wave / Zoho Books / GnuCash, Opening Balances wizard
• Fixed assets — register, depreciation runs, disposal with gain/loss, reconciliation report
• Nonprofit mode — your own words on every screen and document; funds with restrictions, releases, functional expenses, donor acknowledgments, giving statements, pledges (docs/nonprofit-module.md)
• Accessibility — WCAG 2.1 AA, tagged PDFs (docs/accessibility.md)
• Duplicate detection — fuzzy customer/vendor matching at create time

Both themes ship in the box — toggle from the topbar or Alt+D; the choice persists.

Server Edition: an edition is a state, not a SKU — add a second user and you've promoted yourself, free either way.

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#Quick Start

#Windows — signed installer

Download SlowBooksPro-Setup-x64.exe and double-click. Fully self-contained (64-bit Windows 10/11); a portable .zip is on the releases page — it needs the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime, which Windows 11 has and the installer sets up; without it the app offers to open in your browser instead. Each company is one SQLite file under %LOCALAPPDATA%\SlowBooksPro — upgrades and even uninstalls never touch your books.

Serve the office (Server Edition): on the host PC, run the bundled serveredition-install.ps1 from an elevated PowerShell — firewall, startup task, and machine-wide data location handled. Details in docs/server-edition.md.

#macOS — signed Apple Silicon app

Download SlowBooksPro-macos-arm64.dmg, drag SlowBooks Pro to Applications, launch. Signed and notarized with the project's Apple Developer ID on every release; macOS 14+, Apple Silicon. Intel Macs: Docker.

#Docker (Linux servers, Intel Mac)

Docker is optional — multi-user LAN serving on Windows is Server Edition, built into the signed installer above (no containers involved). Docker remains the path for Linux servers and Intel Macs:

git clone https://github.com/VonHoltenCodes/SlowBooks-Pro-2026.git
cd SlowBooks-Pro-2026
docker compose up

Open http://localhost:3001 — PostgreSQL, migrations, and seed data are automatic. The image includes tesseract-ocr and poppler-utils so receipt scanning works out of the box; native installs add them with sudo apt install tesseract-ocr poppler-utils (optional — scanning degrades gracefully when they're absent).

Native installs, demo data, troubleshooting: INSTALL.md. Backups, restore, key rotation: docs/operations.md. Production checklist: docs/release-checklist.md.

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#Documentation

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#Tech Stack

Python + FastAPI on PostgreSQL (SQLite for tests and desktop companies, one file each) with SQLAlchemy 2.0 and Alembic. Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS single-page app — no framework, no build step. WeasyPrint + Jinja2 for PDFs; self-hosted Chart.js (no CDN, LAN-deployable). Hosted-checkout payments only — card data never touches the app. Port 3001.

The Windows and Apple Silicon desktop builds freeze the same codebase with PyInstaller + pywebview. Both sign in CI on every release tag: Windows via Azure Trusted Signing, macOS with the project's Apple Developer ID — signed, notarized, and stapled on the runner (signing credentials live only in repo secrets, never in the repo).

Full layout in docs/development.md.

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#License

Source-available. Free forever. Yours to self-host. Use it for yourself or your business, modify it, redistribute it, keep your clients' books on it. Don't sell it, offer it as a paid service, or build it into one, in whole or in part. Tools and connectors that talk to it are welcome, commercial or not. Illinois law. The full terms, version 2.0, are in LICENSE; the app shows the short form once on first launch and the Windows installer shows the whole thing. Contributions come in under the Contributor Terms in CONTRIBUTING.md.

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#Acknowledgments

• 14 years of QuickBooks 2003 Pro (1 license, $199.95, 2003 dollars)
• Every small business owner who lost software they paid for when activation servers died

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#Contributors

• VonHoltenCodes — creator and maintainer
• Keith (@ContractorKeith) — macOS testing and review

Maintainers by platform are in CONTRIBUTING.md. Everyone who has contributed is credited in the CHANGELOG entry that shipped their work and in the git history.