The job no one wants
(but has to do)
No matter what I did, one part of building a business always slowed me down: the bookkeeping, the accounting and the taxes. I’m Darwin. I’m building a business in the Vancouver area, and I got so tired of all this that I built a product to fix it for good. If you’re building something here too, this will sound familiar.
At first it’s easy. You do the paperwork to incorporate, open a bank account, spend a little money and track it all. Slowly, every small thing you do comes with another to-do. The more I put the business first, the more the bookkeeping got in the way.
So I did what everyone does. First, I made a spreadsheet and tracked everything by hand. Shocker: that didn’t last. Then I got QuickBooks, which you’ve probably heard of. It clearly wasn’t made for a solo founder, and it drove me nuts. I was sending screenshots to ChatGPT asking how to use it, and even then I never felt like I’d set it up properly.
I asked AI for help too. I’d tell ChatGPT and Claude “this one’s business, that one’s personal,” and for a while it felt like they were doing my bookkeeping. Then the conversations got long and they started forgetting. They made things up, too. One day I found an expense in my Claude chat that I never bought. And they only answer what you ask, so nothing kept track of what was still open. Between the spreadsheet, QuickBooks and two chatbots, something always fell through the cracks.
So I had a kind-of, sort-of version of QuickBooks that didn’t do anything for me. My year-end would come in September and I’d have to untangle the mess I’d made. After three weeks of trying, I gave up and dumped it all on my accountant.
And after collecting every statement from every account for the whole year, you know what I got back? Another spreadsheet. I’d used my personal card for business too, and my accountant needed to know which charges were really for the business.
I’d already spent weeks on it, I’d paid someone else to sort it out, and now I was the one explaining what happened. Try going back to an Amazon charge from eight months ago and working out whether that $55.90 was for the business. I couldn’t remember, so I marked those personal rather than risk getting it wrong. That’s money I never claimed.
I didn’t start a business
to become a part-time accountant.
For a long time I thought I was the problem, and that was partly true. I could have been more organized. But I didn’t want to think about any of this. I wanted to put the business first, and I completely underestimated how hard all of it is, especially with a day job on top. Forget tax strategy. I was stuck on the basics.
As I talked to more founders, I realized I wasn’t the only one. Everyone waited until the last minute to untangle the mess. Everyone’s accountant sent them the same spreadsheet. None of us liked QuickBooks, and we were all paying for it anyway.
It’s not our accountant’s job to sort this out. It’s ours as owners. And it’s 2026. Companies are building flying cars, and we’re still marking up spreadsheets our accountants send us.
So I built my own tool, made exactly for how I work. Every expense is marked business or personal and sorted into the right CRA category, and when it isn’t sure, it asks me. It tracks business expenses on my personal cards, tells me what the business owes me, and keeps that balance up to date when I take money out. At year-end it’s all in one simple package I forward to my accountant, who still checks and signs off on everything. The headaches are gone, for both of us.
If you’re still reading, you’ve probably been here too, or you want to start a business and all of this scares you. I get it. I built Stacko to get my time back, and I’m sharing it in the hope it does the same for you.
I’m not rushing it. I’d rather release something that really works. And to be clear, I’m not an accountant. I’m a business owner who struggled with this for years and wants to make it easier for people like me.
Join the waitlist and I’ll let you know when it’s ready. If you have questions, write to me at support@stacko.ca and we’ll go from there.