A QuickBooks Solopreneur alternative built for the Schedule C filer

Why I built this after leaving QuickBooks

I'm Spencer Wood. I run a one-person consulting practice and I file Schedule C every year. For a while I paid QuickBooks for the job, and two things wore me down.

The first was cost. QuickBooks Solopreneur's Lite plan is $20 a month at list price, $240 a year. I was paying that for an accounting product built to scale into payroll, inventory, and a chart of accounts, none of which a solo Schedule C filer uses. I wanted mileage, expenses, time, an invoice now and then, and a clean number to hand my tax software in April. I was paying enterprise-shaped pricing for a one-line tax form.

The second was reliability. Transactions duplicated. Syncs failed. When I reached out, support did not resolve it. Those are common complaints on Capterra, G2, and Reddit, and I hit them firsthand. So I built the tool I actually wanted: Schedule C tracking, $6 a month, no payroll module, no chart of accounts, no upsell screens. I use it for my own business every day.

What QuickBooks Solopreneur does well

This page is a fair comparison, so here is the honest part. QuickBooks has real strengths, and for some people they outweigh everything below.

If you already file with TurboTax, QuickBooks lives in the same family and the handoff between them is tight. That single-vendor path matters to a lot of people, and it is genuinely convenient.

QuickBooks is also a known name with a long track record, thousands of reviews, and an accountant on every block who knows it. If you value brand familiarity and the option to hand your file to a bookkeeper who already works in QuickBooks, that is a real reason to stay. QuickBooks also tracks mileage automatically through its mobile app, which this tool does not do yet. Self Employment Toolkit is new, web-only, and has no App Store listing yet. I would rather you know that up front than find out later.

Price: $6 a month vs $20 a month

The headline gap is the number. QuickBooks Solopreneur comes in three plans at list price: Free, Lite at $20 a month, and Simple Start at $38 a month. The free plan allows 5 mileage trips, 2 receipts, and 2 invoices a month. Self Employment Toolkit is $6 a month, or $48 a year if you pay annually (about $4 a month).

The reason the price can be that low is scope. I am not carrying payroll runs, inventory counts, multi-entity books, or GAAP accounting in the codebase, so you are not paying for them in the subscription. You are paying for the handful of things a Schedule C filer does week to week.

There are no caps and no add-ons. No client limit, no invoice limit, no per-user fee, no multi-currency upcharge, no upgrade prompts firing inside the product. The price you see is the price.

• QuickBooks Solopreneur: Free (5 trips, 2 receipts, 2 invoices a month), Lite $20/mo, Simple Start $38/mo at list price
• Self Employment Toolkit: $6/mo, or $48/yr (about $4/mo)
• No client caps, no invoice caps, no per-user fees
• No payroll, inventory, or multi-entity upcharges, because those features are not here to sell you

What you actually need as a Schedule C filer

If you file Schedule C with no employees and no inventory, your tax year comes down to a short list: business miles, deductible expenses by category, the hours you billed, the invoices you sent, and a clean total to carry into your return.

Self Employment Toolkit is organized around that list instead of around double-entry accounting. Expense categories map to Schedule C lines. Mileage feeds the vehicle section (Part IV) at the IRS standard rate for each trip's date, 76 cents per mile since July 1, 2026. At year end you export a bundle in Schedule C order, as PDF and CSV.

There is no chart of accounts, no journal entries, no debits and credits, and no running account balance to keep in balance. If reading that sentence is a relief, this tool is built for you. If you need any of those things, you have outgrown what I make, and QuickBooks is the more honest fit.

One record instead of four tools

The reason I keep everything in one place is that the pieces of a Schedule C feed each other. A logged trip can become an invoice line item. A tracked hour rolls into a billable invoice. A paid invoice posts to income. All of it lands in the same year-end export.

That is the gap the cheaper single-purpose apps leave open. Mileage-only tools track miles and stop. Time-only tools track hours and stop. With Self Employment Toolkit, mileage, time, expenses, and invoices live in one record so you are not stitching four exports together in a spreadsheet the week taxes are due.

Receipt handling goes further on the Pro plan. Pro can read a photographed receipt and pull the amount, vendor, and date for you, and you can forward a receipt email straight into your expenses. On the Free plan you log expenses by hand or import them by CSV, and the rule-based categorizer still runs.

How to switch from QuickBooks

You do not have to re-key a year of expenses. Export your expense list from QuickBooks Solopreneur as a CSV, then use the Import from QuickBooks button on the Expenses tab. It reads the QuickBooks export format, runs duplicate detection, and shows you a row-by-row preview before anything is saved. You confirm what to import.

Your mileage comes with you too. Export the mileage log from QuickBooks as a CSV and use Import on the Mileage tab. The preview skips trips already in your log and flags any trip the export lists twice, so a doubled export does not double your deduction.

One honest limit: a QuickBooks export does not include receipt images, so the import brings over the expense data, not the original receipt files. Imported rows are tagged so you can tell them apart later. If your spreadsheet is in a different shape, there is a generic CSV path with a column-mapping step too.

From there you add your clients, log a trip in a couple of taps, and your year-end Schedule C export starts building itself. Free includes unlimited mileage trips and 10 time entries a month so you can try the workflow before paying anything.

Common questions

Comparing other tools too? See every comparison, or read the full FAQ.