It was 2015, well past midnight. I was staring at a spreadsheet — hundreds of bank transactions from a client who kept no books, used no software, and couldn't tell me what half those charges were for.
I was entering the same number three times: once in the description column, once for the amount, once for the category. Get one cell wrong and the whole sheet falls apart. GST hand-calculated. Categories hand-assigned. Every row an act of faith that I hadn't mistyped something four rows back.
This wasn't a broken process. This was the process. And that night I asked myself:
Why does this have to be so painful?
The Idea
What if I stopped treating transactions like T-account fragments and started treating them as flat records? One row per transaction, every attribute in its own column — like a pivot table waiting to happen.
I tried it. Three columns first:
| Date | Narrative | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Pulled straight from the bank statement. No re-keying. | ||
Then a Comments column — for the client to explain what a transaction was, in plain words. Then an Accounting Category column — linking each transaction to the chart of accounts.
Five columns. Using a pivot table, I generated reports from those five columns alone. No triple entry. No T-account gymnastics.
It worked.
What Grew from There
Over the next few years, real client problems shaped the structure. Business Percentage for mixed-use expenses. GST Coding for BAS. ITR Labels to map transactions straight to the tax return. Financial Ledger Labels so the same data could produce both financial statements and tax disclosures — without duplicating a single row.
The technology around it changed — relational tables, AI-assisted categorisation, a proper web interface. But the core idea hasn't: one flat, auditable data structure where every transaction is captured once and every report is derived from the same source.
That early experiment became what I now call MyLedger.
Who It's For
MyLedger wasn't built for clients with tidy books. It was built for the ones with no books at all.
The small business owner who can't afford a bookkeeper. The sole trader who tried Xero and gave up after a week. The client who shows up in March with a shoebox of receipts and a bank statement full of mysteries.
In Australia, hundreds of thousands of small businesses fall behind on compliance — not because they don't care, but because existing tools assume clean data, accounting knowledge, and budget for professional bookkeeping.
MyLedger assumes none of that. It assumes your data is messy, you're behind, and the transactions don't make sense yet. Then it gives your accountant the structure to turn that chaos into a lodged tax return, a filed BAS, and financials that actually reflect what happened.
That's the whole story, really. A late-night frustration, a simple idea, and a lot of years making it work for the people who need it most.