Tax-Ready Bookkeeping for Solo Creatives (Without QuickBooks)

I want to start with a confession: I’m not an accountant. I’ve never been an accountant. I’m a sticker maker who ended up running a real business with real income and real expenses, and at some point the IRS started caring about my activities, and I had to figure out bookkeeping that wouldn’t make me cry every April.

If that’s you too — keep reading. This is what actually works for a one-person creative business when you don’t want a $30/month accounting subscription you’ll never open.

What “tax-ready bookkeeping” actually means

Your accountant doesn’t need fifteen thousand rows of every transaction. Your accountant needs a clean monthly summary that tells them: how much did you bring in, how much did you spend, and what did you spend it on.

That’s it. That’s the deliverable.

Everything else — the journal entries, the chart of accounts, the reconciliations, the “you should learn double-entry bookkeeping” pressure — is either for businesses much larger than yours, or for accountants doing the work, not for you doing the work.

If you’re a solo creative making under a few hundred thousand a year, your bookkeeping system just needs to do four things well:

Log income (where it came from, when, how much)
Log expenses (what category, when, how much, with a receipt)
Track mileage (date, miles, purpose)
Spit out a clean summary at tax time

If your software is doing more than this, you’re paying for features you don’t need. If it’s doing less than this, you’re going to have a bad April.

The categories that actually matter

For a solo creative business, the IRS cares about a small handful of expense categories. Most of your costs will fall neatly into:

Cost of goods sold — supplies, materials, anything that goes into making your product
Shipping — postage, packaging, shipping software
Platform/marketplace fees — Etsy fees, Shopify fees, Stripe fees
Marketing — ads, paid promotions, email tools
Software subscriptions — Canva Pro, scheduling tools, anything ongoing
Office supplies — paper, pens, printer ink
Mileage — business driving (post office, supply runs, in-person events)
Home office — a percentage of your home costs if you have a dedicated workspace
Professional services — your accountant, your lawyer, anyone you pay for help

If your bookkeeping system can sort entries into these buckets and add them up at the end of the year, you have what you need. Anything beyond this is overkill for most solopreneurs.

Why marketplace integrations are a trap

This is where I disagree with a lot of conventional advice.

QuickBooks Self-Employed will integrate with Etsy and pull in every single transaction automatically. That sounds great. In practice, it means your bookkeeping software is now full of fifteen thousand individual line items — every $0.20 transaction fee, every $4.50 shipping label, every refund and adjustment, scattered across the year.

That’s noise, not data. Your accountant can’t use it. You can’t use it. And worst of all, when you go to look at “how much did I spend on shipping this month,” you have to add up four hundred individual entries instead of looking at one number.

The cleaner approach: pull your monthly summary directly from Etsy’s financial dashboard. Etsy already does the math for you. Net income for the month — one number. Total fees — one number. Total shipping you paid — one number. Total marketing/ads — one number. Enter four lines at the end of each month, with a note that says “Etsy — May 2026 summary.” Attach the PDF if you want.

Total time per month: about two minutes.

This is the system I use. This is what I built into Maryn because I couldn’t find software that let me work this way.

A simple monthly bookkeeping routine

Here’s the rhythm that keeps me out of April panic:

Daily (when applicable): Log mileage the same day you drive. Attach the receipt from your email if there is one. The longer you wait, the harder this gets — but if you only drive once or twice a week for business, daily becomes easy.

Weekly (5 minutes): Log any one-off expenses. Office supply order. A new software subscription you signed up for. Anything that doesn’t fit into a marketplace summary.

Monthly (15 minutes): Pull your platform summary (Etsy, Shopify, whatever). Enter your monthly net income and main expense categories as a handful of clean lines. Reconcile against your bank statement — does the total match? Good.

Quarterly (30 minutes): Estimated taxes if you owe them. (Talk to your accountant about whether you do.)

Annually (1-2 hours): Pull a year-end report. Send it to your accountant. Done.

That’s the whole thing. No reconciliation rituals. No double-entry tears. Just a small habit of logging things as they happen, and a five-minute monthly routine.

What you actually need in software

The bar is low. You need:

A way to enter income with a date, amount, source, and note
A way to enter expenses with a date, amount, category, and (ideally) an attached receipt
A way to log mileage with a date, miles, and purpose
A summary view that adds it all up by category and by month
A printable year-end report you can hand to your accountant

If your software does these five things well, you have everything you need. Anything else — fancy AI categorization, real-time bank syncing, multi-currency, “tax preparation tools” — is sold to you because the company needs to justify a monthly subscription.

You don’t need monthly. You need clean. You need fast. You need boring.

What I built

Maryn does these five things and stops there. It’s the bookkeeping system I wanted when I was paying QuickBooks $20/month and not opening it. Income, expenses, mileage with attached receipts, monthly summary, year-end print report for the accountant. That’s it. That’s the whole money side of the app.

It’s $197, once. No subscription. The data lives on your computer. You can use it forever.

If your bookkeeping situation right now is a spreadsheet you’re scared to open, or QuickBooks tabs you keep avoiding, or just the gnawing background sense that you’re going to have a bad April — Maryn is at maryn.app.

You don’t need fancy. You need boring that works.