Everything PrivateBooks does.
Bookkeeping, deduction helpers, and a tax handoff package — all of it offline, on your own machine.
Features
“Am I tax-ready?”
A plain checklist tells you exactly what's left before your books are ready to hand off — no guessing.
Reports that make sense
Profit & loss, a cash-flow chart, your top vendors, and recurring subscriptions you forgot you're paying for.
Mileage & home office
Log business trips and your home-office square footage; PrivateBooks estimates the deduction using IRS rates.
The platform's cut
Rover, Wyzant and the rest keep their fee before you ever see the money. Book the gross and the fee separately, so you don't pay tax on income you never received.
Split a charge
One purchase that was part business, part personal? Split it across categories — the parts always add up exactly.
Lock a filed year
Close a tax year and PrivateBooks protects it, so a stray edit or re-import can't change a number you already filed on.
Back up & restore
Your books are one file you own. Back it up, move it to a new computer, and pick up exactly where you left off.
Answers where you need them
A “?” next to anything unfamiliar opens a plain-English explanation, and the full help centre works offline like everything else.
How it works
Tax-ready in four steps.
Built for business owners, not accountants. No jargon, no blank chart of accounts.
What kind of work do you do?
Driver, delivery, freelancer, creator, cleaner, handyman, tutor, pet sitter — pick yours and answer three plain questions. PrivateBooks sets your books up pre-loaded with the deduction categories people in your line of work actually claim, each mapped to its real Schedule C line.
No tax research required.
Drop in your statements.
Download a CSV or PDF from your bank — the same file you'd download anyway — and open it. PrivateBooks reads the columns automatically, handles US and European number formats, and skips anything you've already imported, so re-importing is always safe.
CSV or PDF, any common layout.
Confirm — in plain English.
Everything is sorted already. You only check the few it wasn't sure about. Teach it a merchant once and it remembers forever; transfers between your own accounts are matched and kept out of your totals so the same dollar is never counted twice.
Teach it once, it remembers.
Hand off tax-ready books.
A Profit & Loss and a Schedule C summary where every line maps to a real line on the IRS form — ready for your preparer to copy straight across. Download the whole package as a spreadsheet bundle or a clean PDF.
Schedule C is the verified workflow.
See the shape of your year
Where your money came from — and went.
A clean cash-flow chart shows money in versus money out, month by month, so you can see at a glance whether the business is bringing in more than it spends. Transfers between your own accounts don't muddy the picture.
One charge, more than one thing
Split a purchase in seconds.
Bought supplies and something personal on the same receipt? Divide the charge into parts, each with its own category. PrivateBooks keeps the original for your records and makes sure the parts add up to the penny.
No accounting degree required
Answers right where you need them.
A little “?” next to anything unfamiliar opens a plain-English explanation, and a full help centre is one click away — written for business owners, not accountants. It works offline, like everything else.
What makes the numbers trustworthy
- Sign-aware categorization. Money-in can't land in an expense bucket and money-out can't be booked as income, which kills whole classes of mis-categorization.
- Transfers excluded. Moving money between your own accounts, owner draws, loan principal, credit-card payments and personal spending are kept out of income and deductions — they aren't business activity.
- Nothing hidden. Anything still uncategorized is flagged and excluded from totals until you review it, so your P&L is never quietly wrong.
- 41 categories, each mapped to a real form line. You never have to invent a chart of accounts.
What PrivateBooks is not
We'd rather tell you now: it isn't payroll, invoicing, inventory, or live bank feeds. It isn't tax filing and it isn't tax advice — it prepares a bookkeeping summary for you and your tax preparer. Partnership, S-corp and C-corp modes produce grouped bookkeeping summaries; Schedule C for sole proprietors and single-member LLCs is the verified tax-ready workflow.