When to consider Private Accounting

Private Accounting is built for the business where one person does the books — a solo bookkeeper, a sole proprietor, or a small team running one or several entities. It's traditional double-entry, offline, and installed on your own device. Here's where that fits well, and where it doesn't.

Good fit if

• You're the only person (or one of a small few) entering transactions — not a team that needs to work in the same file at once.
• You manage more than one small business entity — corporate, sole proprietorship, partnership, or non-profit — and want them kept separate. This includes solo bookkeepers managing several client companies: there's no additional cost per company file, and a multi-seat licence doubles as a hardware hot-backup.
• Cost matters more than convenience features — a one-time purchase suits a non-profit or small business watching every dollar better than an ongoing subscription.
• You enter transactions as they happen and reconcile the bank statement against your books afterward, rather than treating the bank statement as the books. Private Accounting is built around true transaction reconciliation, not bank feed accounting.
• Payroll is handled elsewhere — a payroll processor, a spreadsheet, or manually — for a small enough headcount that recording it as journal entries is practical. Memorized transactions make entering payroll straightforward, and built-in T4 and RL-1 reports help you check it against what your processor or spreadsheet calculated.
• You want performance and reliability under your own control, not dependent on network speed or a server's load — and you want your books to keep working when your connection doesn't.
• You want your data to stay on your machine, encrypted, and out of anyone else's hands. Private Accounting has no visibility into your database files; the only network activity is your browser's own update check for the installed app, and a licence check or update you initiate yourself.
• You'd rather work in a classic multi-window desktop interface than the single-panel, webby style most accounting software uses today.

Not the right fit if

• You need more than one person editing the same company file at the same time, or need role-based permissions beyond basic file access and the administrative code for closed or locked periods — a server-based or SaaS system built for concurrent, multi-user access fits better here.
• More than one person uses the same computer Private Accounting is installed on. Its security depends on controlling who has physical and OS-level access to that machine; if that access is already shared, this protection doesn't hold.
• You want your books built from an automatic bank feed rather than entered and then reconciled — that's a deliberate design choice here, not a missing feature.
• Your inventory needs go beyond FIFO lot costing — Private Accounting's inventory handling is intentionally lightweight, and FIFO only.
• You have more than a handful of employees and want payroll run from inside the software. Recording payroll via journal entry works well for a small headcount; it isn't a substitute for real payroll software at larger scale.
• You need to share the company file with an external accountant or bookkeeper and have no secure way to deliver it — no remote access to the machine, no secure file transfer. There's no live server to connect to, so the file itself has to move, securely, between the two of you.
• You regularly need to print very large reports in one go. A General Ledger covering roughly 15,000+ transactions in a period (around 500+ printed pages) can exceed what a browser's print preview can handle — viewing the report and the underlying numbers are unaffected, only printing that much at once. The desktop builds may have more headroom here; see Choosing a version.
• You don't want the responsibility that comes with real local encryption — backups are one button, but you have to press it, and a passphrase you forget can't be reset by us. There's no backdoor.