I run a gym. My closest friends run a restaurant. None of us trained as accountants, and all of us spend a depressing number of hours every month trying to make our businesses legible to ourselves.
Equipment receipts. Trainer payouts. The handful of subscriptions that keep the music app playing and the schedule synced. A coffee with a member who asked for an off-the-clock chat. A new mirror that arrived in three pieces. Cleaning supplies, paid in cash, no receipt at all — just a number written on the back of a napkin that I trust myself to remember in three months and never do.
The receipts problem is small in a sentence and enormous in a life. It is the reason my friend can't tell me, in May, what his food costs were in March. It is the reason I overpaid taxes last year by an amount I'm too embarrassed to write here. It is also, I think, completely fixable.
That is the short version of why I'm building Starlog.
It looks like a paperwork problem. It's a memory problem.
If you only run payroll and pay rent, the receipts problem is invisible. You log into your bank, reconcile a few line items, and your accountant handles the rest. The whole thing takes ten minutes a month.
If you run a business that transacts in the real world — a gym, a restaurant, a studio, a freelance practice, a one-person consultancy, a salesperson on the road — the receipts problem is most of the work of bookkeeping. You're not reconciling. You're constructing. Each receipt is a small narrative ("equipment delivery, mirror replacement, March 4"), a category ("repairs and maintenance, deductible"), and a number. Lose the narrative and the number is useless. Lose the receipt and you've handed money to the tax office that wasn't theirs.
What the tax office actually requires is small: keep them, keep them legible, keep them honest. There's no canonical software, no required format, no government portal that ingests the pile for you. It's an open problem with a hundred thousand wrong answers.
So people improvise. The most common improvisation, by a margin you would not believe, is a shoebox. Or a folder on a phone called "Receipts" with 2,300 photos in it.
The existing tools are built for the wrong person
Some of the tools that exist for this problem are very good. They are mostly built for accountants, who are the people accountant-software companies talk to and design for. If you are an accountant, QuickBooks is a fine piece of software.
If you are not an accountant — if you are a gym owner who has to do bookkeeping the way I have to fix the boiler, which is to say with a YouTube tab open and a sense of dread — QuickBooks is a twelve-week course you didn't enroll in. Same for FreshBooks, Wave, Xero, Zoho Books, and most of the rest. They are not bad. They are not designed for you.
The other category is receipt-scanning apps. These are mostly built for the corporate expense-reimbursement workflow: you snap a receipt at a client dinner, it gets routed to your manager, she approves it, the company pays you back. That is a real problem. It is not the same problem as "I own this thing and I need to know which of these forty-eight charges actually counts as a business expense when I file."
Between those two extremes — too much software and too little — is a long quiet space where most of the people I know actually live. That space is where I'm trying to build something.
What Starlog is, and what it isn't yet
I'm going to be honest because nothing erodes trust like a website that lies.
Starlog is a small app for one-person and small-team businesses to keep their receipts and expenses straight. It's early. The feature list is short. We are working on it every day, and some of the marketing copy on this site is more confident than the product has earned yet — I'm fixing that, post by post, as we go.
What it's for is more interesting than what it is today: it's for the person who would rather not run an accounting practice on the side of their actual job. It's for the gym owner who, three weeks before filing season, opens a spreadsheet and feels her stomach drop. It's for my friend who can't, in May, tell me what his food costs were in March.
The bet is that you can build something that works for that person — not by simplifying QuickBooks, which is a fool's errand, but by starting from scratch with a different question. The question being: what would a busy, smart, non-accountant person actually do with this once a month, and how do we make that thirty minutes instead of three hours?
Why I'm building it
There's a grand version of this paragraph and an honest one. I'll do the honest one.
I have watched the people I care about lose entire weekends to this. I have watched my friends, who are genuinely good at their work, give up on tracking expenses entirely and just absorb the loss. I have done it myself. None of us are stupid. The tools failed us.
I'm reasonably good at building software, and I think this problem deserves more thought than it has gotten. So I'm spending years on it.
If that resonates — if you've ever stared at a shoebox, a photo folder, or a chaotic Drive and thought there must be a better way to do this — you're the person I'm building Starlog for. We're early. Come along.