We’ve been quiet on Fastbooks for the past few months, but we haven’t been idle. We’ve been building a whole new version of Fastbooks, and today we’re excited to share it with you.
Where we started
Fastbooks started back in June 2024 with a simple vision: build a bookkeeping tool that is simpler and more transparent than what was out there. We wanted to make accounting easy for someone starting their very first business, with honest pricing and as little busywork as possible.
The first version of Fastbooks was a deliberately simple tool, built on Firebase and Google Cloud. It let us get something into your hands quickly, and it served us well.
Why we rebuilt it
Over the past year, a lot of you joined us, and you brought use cases we hadn’t planned for. Businesses with thousands of bills a month. Bookkeepers managing several companies at once. Owners who wanted to slice their numbers in ways the original Fastbooks simply couldn’t handle well.
Two problems kept coming up. First, speed: querying large amounts of financial data was getting slower as your books grew. Second, cost: running those queries on Firebase was getting expensive, and we didn’t want that cost to end up in your pricing.
Patching around those limits would only have taken us so far. So we made the harder decision: rebuild Fastbooks from the ground up, on a foundation designed for real accounting at scale.
Introducing Fastbooks V2
The new Fastbooks runs on a proper double-entry ledger. Every invoice, bill, expense, payment and journal entry posts balanced debits and credits, and every report is calculated straight from those entries. That means your numbers are consistent everywhere you look, and they stay fast no matter how much history you have.
Here’s what’s new.
A faster, smarter bill processing pipeline
Bills are where most of the busywork lives, so we rebuilt this pipeline from scratch.
- Import bills in bulk, including straight from a Google Drive folder.
- Automatic scanning reads the vendor, dates, line items and taxes from each file, and remembers how each vendor formats its dates.
- Side-by-side preview shows the original file next to the bill, with zoom and rotate, so checking a bill takes seconds.
- Rescan with notes. If something was read wrong, tell Fastbooks what to fix and it will rescan, and you can apply the same fix to that vendor’s other drafts.
- Duplicate detection flags bills that share a vendor’s invoice number, so nothing gets booked twice.
- Supplier rounding and tax numbers are matched against the file, so your books agree with what the vendor actually printed.
Better AI, built into your books
AI in Fastbooks is now there to help you understand your numbers, not just to enter them.
- Ask Fastbooks lets you ask plain-English questions about your books right from the dashboard, and follow up on the answers.
- Dashboard insights explain what changed and why, instead of leaving you to work it out from a chart.
- A chart of accounts drafted for you when you set up a new organization, so you’re not starting from a blank page.
Reporting dashboards that keep up
- A new dashboard that shows where your business stands at a glance.
- Reports built directly from the ledger, with quick periods like this month, last quarter or last year, plus custom ranges.
A cleaner, faster interface
We redesigned the whole app around the way you actually work.
- An Inbox that collects what needs your attention in one place.
- Bank feeds, reconciliation and month-end close, so you can match transactions and lock finished months.
- Keyboard shortcuts, a command menu, bulk actions and undo throughout.
- Multiple organizations under one login, team invites, and a full audit trail of every important change.
- Sign in with Google, and layouts that work on your phone and tablet.
Bringing your books over
If you’re already using Fastbooks, you don’t need to start again, and there’s nothing to set up by hand. Sign up for the new Fastbooks with the same email address you use today and confirm your email. We’ll find the organizations you own or manage and offer to bring them over as part of signing up.
Pick an organization and we’ll do the rest. Your contacts, invoices, bills, expenses and history come across, each in its original currency, along with your chart of accounts and organization name.
You can get started at v2.fastbooks.app.
Thank you
None of this would exist without the businesses who trusted us with their books over the past year and told us exactly where Fastbooks fell short. V2 is our answer to that feedback, and it’s only the beginning.
Take it for a spin and let us know what you think. As always, you can reach us at [email protected].
Let’s keep building something great together.
