About the tool

A small team that builds one recording tool, keeps it working, and hands back everything it stores in a form somebody else can read.

How it started

The tool has been built and maintained since 2013 from Baku, Azerbaijan. It started for an unglamorous reason: nearly everybody we knew who kept a long series of figures was keeping it in three places at once. A notebook, a sheet that had grown too wide to read, and a firm memory of the one month somebody forgot to copy across.

Building something small and independent was the way to change that. The team stays small on purpose. There is no sales layer between you and the people writing the code, and there is nothing in the file format that exists only to keep your record inside it.

How we practice

Three commitments carry most of the weight. The first is that a figure you entered is never lost and never changed without a trace: corrections are entries, and the previous value stays in the history. The second is that every check is one you can read and one you can switch off, because a rule you cannot inspect is a rule you cannot trust. The third is that everything comes out again, in a format another program reads, on the day you ask.

A even pace is part of the method rather than a limitation of it. A recording tool that changes shape every quarter costs its users more in relearning than it ever returns in new buttons.

Who it is for

The tool suits people who keep something over years rather than report on something over a week: a bookkeeper reconciling two sheets by hand, a club secretary maintaining a membership list, somebody cataloguing a collection shelf by shelf, or anyone who has counted the same thing on the same day of the month for eleven years. What those have in common is that the value of the material is in its continuity, which is exactly what a pile of loose files destroys first.

What we do not do

We do not pass your material to anybody, we do not tell you what your figures mean, and we do not keep a copy you cannot export. We are also a poor substitute for a full accounting package with double entry and a statutory audit trail; where that is what the situation needs, saying so in the first exchange is more useful than accepting the practice and discovering it after eight months of entries.

What we hold to

• You own it. The series, the definitions and the history are yours, and a full export is always one action away.
• Nothing is corrected silently. A value we cannot accept is reported to you; it is never quietly replaced with one we prefer.
• Every rule is readable. A check states in plain language what it tests, and you can switch it off.
• Keep the note. Corrections are entries, with the previous value, the time and the reason preserved beside them.
• Files open later. The format is versioned and readable backwards, so an update never asks you to abandon what you already have.

Editorial position of this site

The pages on this site describe our own practice. Where a specific format or system is named, it is because it is genuinely hard to substitute, and the reasoning is stated so you can disagree with it. Nothing here is included because a vendor paid for the mention.