Studio Saelix
Project · Daicho · Coming soon
- ProjectDaicho
- DisciplineBookkeeping · Financial tools
- StatusComing soon · 2026
- Years2026 - present

Bookkeeping
that respects you.

Daicho is calm bookkeeping for makers, freelancers, and small studios. Plain language, zero spreadsheets, the math hidden on purpose.

— 01The dashboard, the way it should look on a Tuesday morning.

A clean ledger, told
in plain language.

Hello, Émile — March looks healthy.

— Mar 2026
Revenue · MTD
$12,840
▲ 18% vs Feb
Expenses · MTD
$3,210
— in line
Set aside · tax
$2,890
— 22.5% rule
Take-home · ready
$6,740
— pay yourself
— Cashflow · last 12 months In Out
APR JUN AUG OCT DEC FEB today
Date Description Category Amount Status
Mar 18 Atelier Margaux — branding retainer Revenue + $4,200.00 CLEARED
Mar 16 Figma · annual seats × 2 Software − $360.00 RECONCILED
Mar 15 Quarterly tax — set aside Reserve − $945.00 AUTOPILOT
Mar 12 Hetzner — server rack Ops − $84.00 RECONCILED
Mar 09 Studio Lumière — interior consultation Revenue + $2,800.00 CLEARED
02Why we built it

Bookkeeping software
was built for accountants.

Most makers don't need debits and credits. They need to know: am I okay this month, is the tax handled, and how much can I pay myself.

— The problem

Existing tools speak the wrong language to the wrong person.

QuickBooks, Xero, FreshBooks — they all assume you understand chart-of-accounts, you can interpret a P&L statement, and that filing your VAT return is a routine task. For a freelance designer or a two-person studio, none of that is true.

So makers either pay an accountant they don't fully trust, or they keep everything in a spreadsheet and panic at year-end. Neither is good.

— The approach

Hide the math. Surface the question.

Daicho looks at the same source data — bank transactions, invoices, receipts — but it answers questions a maker actually asks. Am I doing okay? How much can I pay myself? Is tax season handled?

The double-entry ledger is still down there. We just don't make you look at it.

03What we shipped

Six small kindnesses.

None of these are clever. All of them are things we wished a tool did, and then built when nothing did.

— 01

The plain-language dashboard

"Hello Émile — March looks healthy." Not a P&L. Not an income statement. The state of your books, told to you in a sentence.

— 02

Tax autopilot

Every revenue transaction silently reserves the right percentage into a tax envelope. You see it set aside, never spent.

— 03

Pay-yourself math

One number, calculated honestly: revenue minus expenses minus tax reserve minus next month's float. That's what's safe to take.

— 04

Invoices, sent

Templated, branded, emailed. Reminders go out without you. When clients pay, the transaction matches itself.

— 05

Receipts, captured

Snap a photo. We OCR the line items, suggest a category, attach it to the right card transaction. Five seconds.

— 06

Year-end pack

A single PDF — bank statements, P&L, receipts indexed. The thing your accountant actually wants. Generated in March.

04Stack

Built on boring.

Financial software earns trust through predictability. We picked the most boring possible technology — then put care into the surface.

Elixir + Phoenix LiveView for the dashboard — server-rendered, real-time, almost no client JavaScript. The pay-yourself number updates as you move money. — Application
PostgreSQL 15 The ledger lives in Postgres with full double-entry constraints at the schema level. The database refuses to be inconsistent. — Source of truth
GoCardless / Plaid Open banking feeds, EU and US. Transactions arrive within minutes; we deduplicate and categorize before they hit your view. — Bank feeds
Anthropic Claude Receipt OCR + categorization. The model proposes; the user confirms. We never auto-apply with high impact. — Categorization
Typst Year-end PDF rendering. Modern, precise, bilingual layouts. The export looks like it came from a design studio, because it did. — PDF
Sencho Yes — Daicho is deployed by Sencho. We eat our own cooking. — Deployment
- Origin
Studio Saelix · 2026
The brief that became Daicho.
Three years of revenue, scattered across two banks and a spreadsheet. We wanted an app that said "you're fine" on a Tuesday and meant it. Nobody had built it. So we did.
05Where it stands

Numbers as of today.

Daicho is in private beta with a small cohort of studios and freelancers. We open seats slowly — every account onboarded is one we want to keep.

42
— Beta accounts
2s
— Median dashboard render
96%
— Receipt OCR accuracy
0
— Spreadsheets required
- Continue

The other
practice.