Accounting software that's actually yours.

Balanced Sum keeps real double-entry books on your own computer. Free, with no subscription, no account, and nothing in the cloud.

Download free See how switching works

The Balanced Sum home screen for the sample company Riverbend Design Studio. Three tiles read You have $30,926.43, You owe $245.94, and 2026 kept so far $2,421.74. Below them, account cards: Checking Account is badged reconciled through Jul 31 2026 with 3 lines to review and a Continue reviewing button; the other accounts are badged never reconciled, each with an Import statement button. A Your cards section shows a Business Visa owing $156.94, reconciled through Aug 19 2026.

Free means free

No trial, no paid tier, no feature behind a card number. The whole program, for every company you keep.

On the Microsoft Store

Installed and updated by the Store on Windows 10 and 11, signed and certified by Microsoft.

Your books stay home

Everything lives in a real database on your computer. Nothing is uploaded, synced, or sent anywhere.

Bring your whole history with you

Switching usually means typing in one starting balance and abandoning everything behind it. Not here. If your current software can export its accounts and its ledger to CSV or Excel, Balanced Sum takes all of it: every transaction, every year, from QuickBooks, Sage, Xero, Wave, FreshBooks, or a plain spreadsheet.

Export two files

Your list of accounts, and your general ledger or journal, from the software you use now. CSV or Excel, whichever it offers.

Match up the columns

Balanced Sum reads your file's headers and proposes which column is the date, the account, and the amount. You confirm every guess before anything is read for real.

Prove it, then trust it

Nothing posts until it's clean, and each year is checked against your old software's own trial balance, account by account, before it locks.

See exactly how switching works, step by step →

Import the statement, work down the list

Reconciling is the heart of the app. Bring in a bank or card statement and every line is sorted for you: already matched to something you recorded, needing a second look, or new and waiting on a category. You give each one a decision, and nothing is filed behind your back.

The reconcile button stays out of reach until every line has been dealt with. When the bank ties out, the books are right. That's the whole job, most days.

A statement review for the Checking Account, headed with the imported file name and the line count: 3 lines, 0 settled, 0 need a look, 3 new, 0 excluded. Two new lines are shown, a $6.75 debit card purchase at a coffee shop and an $89.10 ACH debit to a phone company, each with a category search box and Add to books, Find a match and Exclude choices. A panel at the foot asks for the statement ending balance and says three lines still need a decision before you can reconcile.

Money came in. Money went out. That's it.

You'll never be asked to pick between a "sales receipt," a "deposit," and a "customer payment" before you can say you got paid. There's one flow for money in, one for money out, and one for moving money between your own accounts, all in plain English.

The double-entry bookkeeping still happens underneath, correctly, every time. And it's all there to look at whenever you want it.

A screen headed Record something, offering three choices side by side: Money came in, for a customer payment, a refund, or interest; Money went out, for a bill, a purchase, or a fee; and Moved between accounts, for transfers between your own accounts.

Statements you can hand to your accountant

Profit & loss for any date range; balance sheet, trial balance, and A/R and A/P aging as of any date you pick. Each one prints straight to paper or PDF, with no spreadsheet cleanup first, and every number on them traces to the entries behind it.

A printable profit and loss statement for Riverbend Design Studio. Income totals $36,379.71 across Sales Income, Service Income and Other Income; ten expense accounts total $28,299.22, leaving net income of $8,080.49. A footer line reads: prepared from the live ledger, every figure traces to journal entries.

Every number explains itself

Click an account on any statement and it opens that account's register, in plain English, back to the original entry, including one imported from your old software years after it happened. A row on an aging report opens that customer's invoices or that vendor's bills. Numbers here aren't dead ends.

The running balance is worked out from the entries themselves every time you look. Nothing is stored, so nothing can drift. Debits and credits are one checkbox away when you want them, and out of your way when you don't.

The register for the Checking Account, balance $17,288.03, listing every entry that touches the account in date order with a signed amount and the running balance after each. Rows that came from a document carry an Open invoice, Open bill or Open payment link.

The rest of the toolkit

Everything a set of small-business books needs, each piece kept deliberately plain.

An invoice badged Paid, with two service lines totalling $1,550.00, a payments panel showing the payment applied, and Void and Print buttons.

Invoices, and getting paid

Write an invoice, print it or save it as a PDF, and record payments against it: full, partial, or with a credit applied. A/R and aging update themselves.

The Checks to print screen for the Checking Account, listing two checks ready to go, $420.00 to Harbor Business Insurance and $212.75 to Bright Print Supply, above a Print 2 checks button.

Bills, and printed checks

Enter a bill when it arrives, pay it when it's due, and print the check on voucher or three-per-page stock. Numbers are assigned up front, so you always know which check went to whom.

The Transactions screen: every posted entry in the company, newest first, with date, account, type, amount and memo filters and a Download CSV button.

Every transaction, one list

Filter everything the company has posted by date, account, type, or amount, or search the memos. Download whatever you're looking at as a CSV.

The Chart of Accounts screen with accounts grouped the standard way: bank accounts, accounts receivable and fixed assets under Assets, then credit cards and accounts payable under Liabilities, each row carrying a code, a name, a balance and an Edit link.

A real chart of accounts

Standard headings, standard groupings, real account codes: the words your accountant already uses. A credit card is filed under Credit cards, not "Other."

The Items screen, split into stocked items with quantities, average costs and values, and services, which show dashes because there is nothing to stock.

Items and purchase orders

Keep a quantity of something and its value is kept with it. Receiving a purchase order fills in the bill for you, and stock can never go negative.

The detail page for a built item showing what's on hand, its average cost, and the bill of materials it is made from, totalling $39.63 at today's costs.

Build parts into finished goods

Give an item a bill of materials and build it: parts come off the shelf, the finished item goes on, and the value moves with them in one posting.

A printable inventory valuation report listing five items, with a reconciling line reading Inventory account $2,262.90, items on hand $2,262.90, difference $0.00.

Stock that proves itself

The valuation report shows your shelves on one side, your books on the other, and the difference between them, worked out separately so they agree on evidence.

A chart that fits your work

You'll never face an empty chart of accounts. Tell the setup wizard what kind of work you do, from services and consulting to construction to rental property, and it builds a working chart that names your world. Change anything afterwards.

Sales tax, only if you charge it

Off by default and completely invisible while it is. Turn it on and you get rates you define, a taxable choice per line, a payable account that builds as you collect, and a report that tells you what to remit.

Your books can't be quietly edited. Not by anyone.

Posted history is permanent

Once a transaction is posted, nothing can edit or delete it: not you, not us, not a bug. Fix a mistake with a correcting entry, which the app writes for you and shows you before it happens. The original stays, forever, for anyone to see. In most accounting software, a closed year can be reopened and quietly changed by whoever has the password. Here it can't be, and that is the whole reason a closed year actually stays closed.

Your data never leaves your machine

There's no account to create, because there's nowhere to send your data.

No cloud. Your database runs on your own computer.
No telemetry. Nothing about your books or your usage is ever sent anywhere.
Backups you control: a plain file, written into a folder on your machine at most once a day.
Works with no internet connection at all. The database comes inside the installer, so the first launch fetches nothing.
One outbound request, and you can switch it off: at most once a day the app asks balancedsum.com for the list of released versions, sending nothing about you with it. All of it, in full →

What it doesn't do

We'd rather you find this out here than three weeks in. Balanced Sum does not run payroll; it does not connect to your bank automatically (you import statement files yourself); it handles one currency; and it doesn't currently ship a Mac, Linux, or phone build. If any of those is the thing you need most, this isn't your program yet.

Stock is tracked, but plainly. Everything is valued at average cost; there is no FIFO, LIFO, or standard costing, one location and no bins, no serial or lot numbers. A build costs exactly what its components cost, with no labor or overhead added, and there are no work orders or routings. There is no landed cost, no drop-shipping, no backorders, no barcode scanning, and no unit-of-measure conversion.