Plain Books was built by someone with 11 years in trucking who watched owner-operators fail because of cash flow timing. It explains your real numbers in plain English — with complete privacy, no accounting degree required.
14 days free. No card required. $29/month after. 30-day money-back guarantee.
Why Plain Books exists
This is what small business owners actually say when nobody's watching. We built Plain Books for every person who's ever felt this way.
"My husband has a trucking company and it's breaking him down slowly every single day. We can't pay our bills, our credit cards are maxed out, all our savings are gone. Our busy season doesn't make enough money to cover our slow season. He is a shell of a human."r/smallbusiness · Trucking company owner
"Payroll being late is the only true accounting emergency."r/Accounting
"One week you're invoicing five clients and feeling on top of the world. The next you're refreshing your email every hour waiting for payments to clear while bills pile up like they're on a timer. Last night I couldn't sleep."r/smallbusiness · Service business owner
"Net 30 and Net 60 payment terms are killing my cash flow. I deliver the work on time, but then I'm stuck waiting two months to get paid while my own bills don't wait. How are small businesses supposed to survive like this?"r/smallbusiness · Freelance designer
"The single most important thing you can do is start tracking cash on a 13-week rolling basis. A document that says 'on March 14th we cannot make payroll' is not something anyone gets to dismiss."r/smallbusiness
"Even when things are relatively sound, I've had runs of very stressful cash flow challenges. Then when things are good you stress over meeting demand. And then there is the ever-present fear that macro changes could crash it all down."r/Entrepreneur · 16-year business owner
Made for real people by real people — not money grubbing corporations.
How it works
No setup fees. No training. No accountant required. If you can download a file from your bank, you can use Plain Books.
Create your account in under a minute. Choose the industry that matches your business. Plain Books speaks the financial language of home services, trucking, restaurants, freelancers, and more.
Download the last 3 months of transactions from your bank as a CSV. Plain Books auto-detects Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One, and most other formats. Cleans up the merchant names so you can actually read them.
Plain Books reads your real data and tells you exactly what it means — which weeks are tight, what causes the squeeze, and what you can do about it. Specific to your business. Not generic advice.
Built private from day one
Before we wrote one line of code, we decided: the server should never be able to read a user's financial data. Not us. Not a hacker. Not anyone. Here is exactly how it works.
When you sign up, you create a passphrase. Plain Books uses it to generate an encryption key entirely on your device — it never leaves your browser. Not even Plain Books knows your passphrase.
When you import transactions, every description and category is encrypted on your device using AES-256-GCM — the same standard used by banks and governments — before anything is sent to our servers. Only the amounts (numbers needed for calculations) are stored unencrypted.
What Plain Books stores looks like: aGVsbG8gdGhpcyBpcyBlbmNyeXB0ZWQ= — not merchant names, not descriptions, not anything readable. Even if our servers were compromised, your financial data is unreadable.
When Plain Books explains your cash position, it passes transaction amounts, dates, and category patterns to generate the explanation — never your merchant names or personal identifiers. The explanation is specific to you because the patterns are specific to you, not because we read your raw data.
When you sign up, Plain Books generates a Recovery Kit with 8 backup codes using Shamir's Secret Sharing. Any 3 of the 8 codes restore your account if you lose your passphrase. The kit is generated entirely in your browser — we never see the codes. Print it. Store it somewhere safe.
We cannot sell what we cannot read. We cannot be forced to hand over what we do not have. This is not a policy. It is how the system is built.
The product
How much cash do you actually have today? What's coming in this week? What's going out? A plain English paragraph that explains what the numbers mean for your specific business.
No scroll required. No acronyms. The most important financial fact about your business, on one screen.
A week-by-week cash forecast that separates what's confirmed (payroll, loan payments, regular clients) from what's variable (irregular income, fluctuating expenses).
Yellow weeks mean your worst-case scenario gets tight. Red means you need to act. If everything is green, it tells you that too — clearly.
One sentence. One date. One action. The most important financial fact about your business right now.
Plain Books sees only patterns and amounts — never your account numbers, never your personal details. Your transaction descriptions are encrypted on your device before anything is stored. The plain English explanation is generated from the patterns, not from reading your private data.
If everything is fine, it tells you that. Calmly. Without making you feel like something might still be wrong.
Simple pricing
No tiers. No upsells. No surprises. The same product whether you pay monthly or annually.
Not happy after 30 days of paid use? We'll refund every penny. No questions asked.
Our promises
These aren't marketing lines. They're built into the code.
All transaction descriptions are encrypted client-side before they leave your browser. We designed it that way intentionally. Not even we can read it.
Export everything, free, any time you have an active account. Cancel or get a refund and you have 30 days to take your data with you. We'll remind you twice before it's deleted.
Plain Books makes money from subscriptions, not from advertising. We never sell your data. We never let advertisers target you. Revenue from being useful, not from trapping you.
Plain Books was built by someone who spent 11 years in trucking and logistics watching owner-operators fail because of cash flow timing. This tool exists because we needed it and nothing else worked.
When you sign up, Plain Books generates a Recovery Kit with 8 backup codes. Any 3 codes restore your account if you ever lose your passphrase. You control the keys. Always.
Cancel your subscription any time from the billing page. No chat required. No retention flow. No guilt trip. You're done when you say you're done.
14 days free. No card required. Upload your first bank CSV and see your actual cash position in minutes.
Start your free trial$29/month after trial. Cancel any time. 30-day money-back guarantee.