Reconstructed · Clean-room · MIT-derived

Bookkeeping that stays on your computer

SlowBooks Pro is a free, source-available accounting app for Windows, Mac, and Linux. No cloud, no subscription, no account to create. Your books live on your hard drive, where they belong.

Download for Windows Download for macOS All platforms View on GitHub
Signed Windows installer, verified publisher macOS: Developer ID signed and notarized by Apple Windows · Mac · Linux Analytics & AI · v2.10.2 No telemetry or account
SPECIMEN · DASHBOARD · v2.10.2
SlowBooks Pro 2026 - Company Snapshot
SlowBooks Pro dashboard with total receivables, overdue invoices, active customers, and monthly revenue chart
Connected: localhost:5432 39 accounts loaded Ready
What makes SlowBooks different

Where your books actually live

Every other accounting app today wants you to host your books on their servers. SlowBooks doesn’t. It runs on the computer in front of you, and that’s the whole point.

Completely local

No SaaS backend. No third-party cloud. Your ledger is a PostgreSQL database on your hardware. Close the laptop and your books close with it.

Free forever

There is no free trial, and no paid tier to graduate to. The license is source-available and permits personal, internal, and enterprise use at no cost.

You own the data

PostgreSQL backups, IIF exports, CSV downloads, PDF statements. Walk away to another tool any time. No lock-in and no contract to exit.

New in v2.10.2, September 2026

The bank register is the ledger

Ten releases since the v1 site. The newest one changed how the books handle a bank account: the register is the ledger. What a payment typed into the checking register does, it does to account 1000 — because it is the same thing. The full release ledger →

  • v2.10.2
    You can edit your chart of accounts again. Every account has an Edit button, and the ones your books post to are marked and explained rather than hidden.
  • v2.10.1
    A document is never accepted without its journal entry. Renumbering an account the software posts to is refused instead of quietly stopping new documents from reaching the books; renaming is still yours to do.
  • v2.10
    The bank register is the ledger. Register entries post; feeds and imports match what you already entered and the rest wait in To review; transfers pay credit cards; reconciliation ticks ledger lines. PDF receipts scan on Windows and macOS with nothing to install.
  • v2.9
    Nonprofit mode. One switch and the books speak donor, pledge, fund and grant — restricted net assets, Form 990 expense columns, IRS-language receipts and year-end giving statements.
  • v2.8
    Benefits engine and 50-state withholding. A benefit is a code with a rule: pre-tax order, limits, employer matching, per-code GL. Every state's 2026 figures, with sources.
  • v2.7
    Jobs and job costing, drilling from cost type to the posted line — plus receipt intake through the OCR built into your Mac or PC.
  • v2.6
    Sales receipts. Point-of-sale style sales on one screen, the sale and its payment recorded together, with importers for your QuickBooks receipt history.
  • v2.5
    Server Edition. The same signed installer serves the whole office from one Windows PC — roles, username logins, per-user audit trail. Everyone else needs a browser.
  • v2.4
    Automatic bank feeds via SimpleFIN. The credential is yours alone, there is no middleman server, and duplicates are skipped on arrival.
  • v2.3
    Migrate Data — Xero, MYOB, Sage 50, Wave, Zoho Books and GnuCash, each dry-run-verified against your trial balance before anything posts.
Nonprofit mode on macOS and Windows: the Company Snapshot in donor words, the Statement of Functional Expenses, the Statement of Activities compared to prior year, Releases from Restriction, the Report Center in dark theme, and a Pledge Report PDF
Nonprofit mode · new in v2.9

Funds, net assets, functional expenses, donor documents

One switch and the books speak donor, pledge, fund and grant. Funds carry donor restrictions and release from them; every expense knows whether it is program, management or fundraising, with allocation rules for the shared ones; the Statement of Activities, Statement of Financial Position, Fund Balances and Statement of Functional Expenses reconcile to the cent; receipts, acknowledgment letters and year-end giving statements carry the IRS language. Free, for the groups that pay for a "nonprofit edition" of everything else.

Funds & restrictions Form 990 Part IX columns Donor acknowledgments Giving statements
SlowBooks Pro Server Edition dashboard served over an office network, with the Server Edition sidebar badge
Server Edition

One office PC serves everyone

Run the signed installer's server mode on one Windows machine and the whole office works in a browser - users with roles (admin, bookkeeper, read-only), username logins, and an audit trail that names who changed what. Starts with Windows, before anyone logs in. Add a second user and you're Server Edition; there's nothing to buy.

Users & roles Attributed audit log Starts at boot Browser clients
Analytics dashboard with KPI cards, 12-month revenue trend, A/R aging stacks, expense doughnut, and 90-day cash forecast
Analytics

Real-time analytics dashboard

KPI cards, 12-month revenue trend, A/R and A/P aging stacks, 90-day cash forecast, expense doughnut. Chart.js self-hosted, no CDN. Period selector for MTD / QTD / YTD. CSV and PDF export with branded headers.

4 KPI cards 5 charts CSV + PDF ~26 ms on 3K invoices
AI Insights provider configuration screen with curated model dropdown and seven supported providers
AI Insights

Bring your own AI provider

Seven providers supported: xAI Grok, Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI, a self-hosted Cloudflare Worker gateway, Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, and Google Gemini. Keys Fernet-encrypted at rest. Eleven predefined analyses spanning customers, vendors, banking, P&L, and tax.

8 providers Encrypted at rest 11 analyses Optional
Items form with inventory tracking enabled, showing quantity on hand, weighted-average cost, and reorder point
Inventory

Perpetual inventory & drill-down

Real inventory ledger with weighted-average cost, automatic COGS journal entries on sale, reorder points, and a low-stock report. P&L and Balance Sheet rows are now click-through to the underlying transactions. Saved reports and fuzzy duplicate detection for customers and vendors.

Perpetual ledger COGS auto-post Drill-down Saved reports
QuickBooks Online integration screen with OAuth connection status and entity sync options
Integrations

Stripe, PayPal & Square + QuickBooks Online

Accept online payments through Stripe, PayPal, or Square. Enable any combination and the customer pay page shows a button per processor, every payment auto-recorded with a balanced journal entry. Desktop installs record payments too, no webhook required. OAuth 2.0 sync with QuickBooks Online imports and exports accounts, customers, vendors, items, invoices, and payments with ID-mapped deduplication, and Xero users can migrate in via CSV with dry-run verification.

Stripe · PayPal · Square QBO OAuth 2.0 Public pay page Xero migration
New in v2.5

One product, two ways to run it

Run it on your desktop, or run the same signed installer in server mode and the whole office works in a browser: users with roles (admin, bookkeeper, read-only), username logins, an audit trail that names who changed what, and a startup task that has the books serving before anyone logs in. Add a second user and you've become Server Edition. There's nothing to buy, because there's never anything to buy.

Slowbooks Pro 2026 Edition and Server Edition About dialogs side by side
Get the installer Server Edition setup guide
Agent-ready

Point your AI at your books

Every install ships a self-documenting 499-operation local API. Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Grok CLI - any agentic tool can migrate, configure, and operate your books without a byte leaving your machine.

The AI setup guide
Demonstration

A full day of bookkeeping, in under a minute

Create an invoice, receive a payment, run a P&L. All the things you’d do in QuickBooks, done locally and without a subscription.

6.3 seconds
From open invoice form to posted journal entry.
SlowBooks Pro 2026 - Create Invoice
Invoice entry screen with line items, totals, and customer details
Posted to journal DR=CR Ready
Local latency < 5 ms
Cloud round-trips 0
Monthly fee $0.00
Data leaves machine Never
Install

Pick your platform

Windows gets a signed installer, macOS gets a signed and notarized native app - download, open, done, no command line. Docker covers Linux, Intel Macs, and container-first servers, with bare-metal source installs for that crowd.

Windows - signed native installer INCLUDES SERVER EDITION

A normal Windows app: download, double-click, done. The installer is code-signed (Windows shows a verified publisher, not a SmartScreen warning) and completely self-contained, so there is nothing else to install.

Download SlowBooksPro-Setup-x64.exe

Currently v2.10.2 for 64-bit Windows 10/11, also available as a portable .zip. Each company is its own file (like QuickBooks company files), stored under %LOCALAPPDATA%\SlowBooksPro, so upgrades and even uninstalls never touch your books. When a new version ships, the app’s footer shows an update notice.

Provenance

A love letter to software that respects you

Owns nothing. Phones home to nobody. Runs on hardware you can unplug. Accounting software should be the last thing you’d rent.

“Intuit’s activation servers died in 2017. The hard drive died in 2024. We just wanted to print invoices.”
Questions

Frequently asked questions

Is SlowBooks really free? What’s the catch?

No catch. SlowBooks is source-available under a license that permits free use for personal, educational, and internal business purposes, including at commercial enterprises. The only restriction is you can’t repackage and resell it as your own paid product or hosted service. See the LICENSE for the full text.

Is it “open source”?

The source is public on GitHub and you can read, modify, and redistribute it. Technically the license is “source-available” rather than OSI-certified open source, because of the No-Commercial-Resale clause. In practice, if you’re using it to run your own business, there is no functional difference.

Why is it not on the cloud?

Because accounting data is the last thing that should live on someone else’s server. Your financial history, customer information, payroll, and tax records shouldn’t be subject to some other company’s pricing decisions, breach history, or terms-of-service updates. SlowBooks sidesteps the entire question.

How do I back up my data?

SlowBooks creates PostgreSQL-native backups on demand from the Settings screen. You can also export everything as IIF (for re-import into QuickBooks), CSV, or PDF. If your computer is already backed up by Time Machine, a cloud drive, or an external disk, SlowBooks’ data is already safe along with the rest.

Does it work on Windows?

Yes, natively. Download the signed installer, double-click, and you’re keeping books in under a minute, without a database server to configure first. Windows shows a verified publisher instead of a SmartScreen warning because every release is code-signed. Each company is a single file under %LOCALAPPDATA%\SlowBooksPro, so backups are as simple as copying a file. Docker still works too, if you prefer containers, and serving your whole office over the LAN needs no Docker at all: that’s Server Edition, built into the same signed installer.

Do I need Docker to run the server / multi-user mode?

No. Server Edition is built into the signed Windows installer. Run it in server mode (or use the bundled install script for a boot-time service) and every machine on your LAN connects through a browser, with per-user logins, roles, and an attributed audit trail. Docker is an optional alternative for Linux servers and Intel Macs, never a requirement. See the Server section or the server setup guide.

Can I import from QuickBooks?

Yes. SlowBooks imports IIF files exported from QuickBooks Desktop (including the finicky Mac QB format with quoted thousands separators). It also has OAuth integration with QuickBooks Online for direct import.

Does SlowBooks really have analytics and AI built in?

Yes. v2.0.0 ships an analytics dashboard (KPI cards, charts, 90-day cash forecast, CSV/PDF export) and an optional AI Insights brief. The AI is bring-your-own-key: pick from eight providers (Grok, Groq, Cloudflare Workers AI, a self-hosted Cloudflare Worker, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you point it at). Nothing is sent until you click. Keys are Fernet-encrypted at rest. If you don’t configure a provider, the feature simply isn’t there.

Can my customers pay me online?

Yes, through Stripe, PayPal, or Square (enable any combination). SlowBooks emails invoices with a “Pay Online” button; the customer pays on the processor's hosted page and a balanced journal entry posts back into your local ledger automatically. Card data never touches SlowBooks. Desktop installs record payments on the customer's return, no public webhook needed. The payment URL is a token-scoped page, so customers never need a SlowBooks login.

Is my data secure if it’s all on one machine?

Single-user authentication is built in - setup wizard on first run, argon2id password hashing, rate-limited logins. All API keys you add (AI providers, Stripe, QBO) are encrypted at rest with Fernet. The Docker image runs as a non-root user. v2.0.0 also completed an external security audit pass: SSRF guards on outbound LLM calls, CSV formula-injection protection, schema-validated config payloads, constant-time secret comparison on the Cloudflare gateway. Your books are still on your hardware, same backup story as the rest of your machine (Time Machine, an external disk, whatever you already use).