Why I built Self Employment Toolkit

I got tired of paying QuickBooks for things I never used

My name is Spencer Wood. I run Foundation Consultant Group, a solo consulting practice, and Woodfire Digital, LLC, the company that operates this tool. I am one person. No employees, no inventory, no warehouse, no accountant on retainer. At tax time I file a Schedule C with my 1040, the way most self-employed people in the US do.

For years I paid for QuickBooks. The cheapest plan that did what I wanted ran about $20 a month, and the fuller versions go higher than that. The problem was not really the price by itself. It was that I was paying for payroll, inventory, multi-entity accounting, and a chart of accounts I never opened once. I had no employees to run payroll for. I had no products to count. I was renting an accounting department to track mileage, log a few expenses, and send the occasional invoice.

So I added it up. The features I actually touched in a year would fit on an index card. Everything else on my bill existed for a business that was much bigger and more complicated than mine. I was the wrong customer for the product, and the product was the wrong fit for me.

The bugs were the part that finally pushed me

Price I could rationalize. The reliability I could not. I had transactions duplicate themselves. I had to go hunting through my own books to find which entries were real. When I reached out for help, the support I got did not resolve anything, and I lost hours I will never get back to a tool that was supposed to save me time.

If you have filed a Schedule C while fighting your own bookkeeping software, you know the specific kind of dread I'm describing. You stop trusting your numbers. You second-guess every line because you've already caught the software being wrong once.

I'm a builder by trade, so at some point the obvious thought arrived: I could just make the thing I actually needed. Something that tracks the handful of things a Schedule C filer cares about, charges a fair price, and does not break. That's what this is.

What I built, and who it's for

Self Employment Toolkit keeps mileage, time, expenses, and invoices in one place, and it organizes all of it around the tax form you actually file. A trip becomes a deduction. A time entry becomes a billable line on an invoice. A paid invoice becomes income. At year end it all exports in Schedule C order so you, or whoever does your return, isn't reconstructing the year from a shoebox.

I built it for one specific person: the sole proprietor or single-member LLC owner who files Schedule C. Freelancers, consultants, independent contractors, 1099 workers, gig drivers, the one-person shop. If that's you, the language and the math are aimed straight at your situation.

It is not built for everyone, and I'd rather say so plainly. If you have employees and need to run payroll, if you carry inventory, or if you need full GAAP accounting with a chart of accounts, you have outgrown what I make, and one of the bigger tools will serve you better. I'd point you to QuickBooks or FreshBooks myself before I'd take your money for a fit this poor.

• No payroll module. If you have employees, you've outgrown me.
• No inventory tracking. This is not QuickBooks Online.
• No chart of accounts, no journal entries, no debits and credits, no reconciliation.
• No client caps and no invoice caps. Add and send as many as you need.
• No per-user fees, because the whole product assumes one person.
• No upsell prompts inside the app interrupting your work.

The price, and my promise about it

Pro is $6 a month, or $48 a year if you pay annually. There is a free tier at $0 that covers 20 mileage trips and 10 time entries a month, which is enough to try the tool on real work before you decide. Pro removes the caps and turns on the exports.

Here is the commitment I care about most. I am not going to nickel-and-dime you. The price you see is the price. I'm not going to gate a feature you already paid for behind a higher tier, charge you extra for a second user you don't have, or try to upsell you into tax filing services on top of the subscription. I estimate your taxes so you walk in prepared. I don't try to sell you the filing.

I can promise this because I'm not trying to grow into an enterprise accounting suite. I'm a solo founder building the tool I personally use. When I decide whether to add something, the test is simple: would I use this in my own business? If the answer is no, it doesn't ship, and your bill stays where it is.

This is genuinely run by one person

When you email support, you're emailing me. When a feature changes, it changed because I needed it to or because someone using the tool told me it should. There's no growth team, no roadmap written to please investors, no quarterly push to bolt on modules that justify a price increase.

That has real limits, and I'd rather you know them going in. I am one person, so I can't match the marketing budget or the brand recognition of Intuit. There's no mobile app on the App Store yet; the tool runs in your browser. Automatic GPS mileage tracking is on the way but isn't here today, so for now you log trips yourself.

What I can offer instead is a tool built by someone who sits in the same chair you do, files the same form you file, and pays the same kind of self-employment tax you pay. I use this for my own business every day. That's the reason it doesn't waste your money on things you'll never need.

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