Ledgerbee

Free, self-hosted bookkeeping for freelancers and one-person businesses.
Scan receipts, send invoices and quotes, import the bank, and have your tax figures ready when they're due. The Netherlands is supported first.

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Table of contents

1. About the project
   • Built with
2. Getting started
   • Prerequisites
   • Installation
3. Usage
4. Roadmap
5. Contributing
6. License
7. Contact
8. Acknowledgments

About the project

I run a one-person company and didn't want to pay a monthly fee for bookkeeping software, so I built my own. Ledgerbee covers what a freelancer needs every day and at every tax deadline. Tax rules live in a module per country; the Netherlands (btw and inkomstenbelasting) is the first, and the app itself is in Dutch for now.

• Receipts: photograph a bon and the phone reads it (on the device, offline). Share a PDF invoice from your mail and the server reads its text layer. You check the draft and confirm.
• Invoices and quotes: numbered without gaps, with every field the Belastingdienst requires, a scan-to-pay QR code, e-mail delivery, reminders for late payers and credit invoices for corrections. An accepted quote becomes an invoice in one tap.
• Bank: import a CSV or CAMT.053 export from ING, Rabobank, ABN AMRO, Knab or bunq. Payments are matched to invoices and receipts, and payments without a receipt are listed.
• Btw-aangifte: every rubriek from 1a to 5g for a quarter, in whole euros the way the form wants them. Tap a rubriek to see the invoices and costs behind it before you file.
• Inkomstenbelasting: winst, urencriterium, zelfstandigenaftrek, startersaftrek, MKB-winstvrijstelling, KIA, depreciation and kilometres, from tax tables that are updated each year.
• Reminders: phone notifications and a daily e-mail before every deadline.

Your data stays on your own server. There is one user per install, and a filed quarter is locked so the numbers you filed can't change underneath you.

Built with

The server is a single Rust binary (axum, rusqlite) that holds all data and all tax logic. The app is Flutter for Android and Linux, with Google ML Kit for on-device text recognition and an offline outbox for receipts scanned without signal.

Getting started

Prerequisites

• A machine that stays on: a Raspberry Pi is plenty.
• Rust (the toolchain is pinned in server/rust-toolchain.toml), pdftotext from poppler-utils, and sqlite3.
• Flutter, to build the app.
• Optional: a Brevo account for sending invoices and reminder e-mails. The free tier is enough.

Installation

1. Clone the repo and configure the server:

   git clone https://github.com/Not-Bad-Company/ledgerbee.git
   cd ledgerbee/server
   cp .env.example .env    # set BOEK_SECRET to the output of: openssl rand -hex 32
   cargo build --release

2. Create your account. It asks for a password and prints a QR code for your authenticator app plus ten recovery codes:

   ./target/release/boekhouding create-user you@example.nl

3. Run it as a service. Adjust the user and paths in deploy/*.service first:

   sudo cp ../deploy/boekhouding.service ../deploy/boekhouding-backup.* /etc/systemd/system/
   sudo systemctl enable --now boekhouding boekhouding-backup.timer

4. Keep it off the open internet. Either bind BOEK_BIND to your Tailscale address, or keep 127.0.0.1 and put it behind a reverse proxy or tunnel with https. The app refuses plain http to anything outside your own network.
5. Build and install the app:

   cd ../app
   flutter build apk --release          # Android: install build/app/outputs/flutter-apk/app-release.apk
   flutter build linux --release        # Linux: build/linux/x64/release/bundle/

6. Log in with the server address, your e-mail, password and a code from the authenticator. The overview asks for your company details first; they appear on every invoice.

Usage

• When you pay: tap Kosten toevoegen, photograph the bon or pick the PDF, check the draft, confirm. From another app, share the file to Ledgerbee.
• Once a month: import the bank export, link the suggestions and find the receipts that are missing.
• Each quarter (deadline: the last day of the following month): open Aangifte → Btw, check the rubrieken, copy the whole-euro figures into Mijn Belastingdienst Zakelijk, pay, then mark the quarter Ingediend.
• Before 1 May: open Aangifte → Inkomstenbelasting for last year, export the year as a zip of CSVs and attachments if your accountant wants it, and file.
• Every January: add the new year's figures to server/src/tax/mod.rs. A missing year falls back to the newest one, and the report says so.

Backups run nightly: a consistent SQLite snapshot plus the attachments, kept for eight years (the bewaarplicht is seven). Set BOEK_BACKUP_REMOTE to an rclone remote for an off-site copy.

Roadmap

• Receipts by camera, file or share sheet
• Btw-aangifte with the sources behind each rubriek
• Invoices with scan-to-pay, reminders and credit invoices
• Quotes that turn into an invoice
• Recurring invoices
• Receipts forwarded by e-mail
• UBL / Peppol export
• English interface and more countries
• Web version of the app

The full list is in docs/ROADMAP.md. See the open issues for known bugs and requests.

Contributing

Bug reports are the most useful contribution, especially wrong tax figures: say which rubriek or line, what you expected and why. Pull requests are welcome too. Read CONTRIBUTING.md first, because contributions come with a licence grant.

1. Fork the project
2. Create a branch (git checkout -b feature/quotes)
3. Commit your changes
4. Push the branch and open a pull request

License

Ledgerbee is free to use, change and self-host, for yourself or your own business, under the Elastic License 2.0. You may not offer it to others as a hosted or managed service.

Contact

Daan Hessen, Not Bad Company · contact@notbadcompany.com

Project link: github.com/Not-Bad-Company/ledgerbee

Acknowledgments

• Best-README-Template, which this README follows
• Google ML Kit for on-device text recognition
• printpdf and qrcode for the invoice PDF
• Schibsted Grotesk, Public Sans and JetBrains Mono

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