A few years ago I wrote a book.
It's called Strategie per la Finanza Personale — "Strategies for Personal Finance" — and it's a practical manual: how to bring to your household accounts the same rigor with which companies keep theirs.
The tool I recommended, in the book, was a free and open-source piece of software.
Today I recommend Cashfulness, which I built myself.
This article exists to be honest about one thing: what changed, and above all what did not change, in the passage from the book to the app.
Because the temptation, when you launch a product, is to tell people that before everything was wrong and now everything is right.
That's not how it went. The thinking in the book stayed identical. What changed is the way of putting it into practice — and that change, as I'll explain, matters more than it seems.
What the book said
Let's start there, because without the book Cashfulness would not exist.
The book's central idea is a single one: the method companies use to avoid getting lost in their own accounts works, identically, for a family too.
That method is called double-entry bookkeeping.
It's an accounting technique more than five centuries old — the first systematic description dates to 1494 — and it's simple in principle: every movement of money is recorded twice, on two sides that balance each other. One side is called Debit, the other Credit.
They're not debts, don't be alarmed: they're just the two labels for the two sides of one and the same entry. You buy bread: on one side the cash goes out, on the other the bread comes in. Two sides, same amount.
The control rule is as elegant as the principle: if you add up all the Debits and all the Credits in your books, you must get the exact same number.
If it matches, everything is in order. If it doesn't, there's an error somewhere.
The book explained step by step how to do this at home: build a chart of accounts for a family, record what comes in and what goes out, read the result without being an accountant.
And it explained a distinction that, then as now, I consider the heart of it all.
The distinction that stayed identical
There's one page in the book I care about more than the others. It's about two kinds of things you own.
On one side there were what I called, in essence, assets that produce.
They're the possessions that, while you own them, give you something back: a rented property that collects rent, shares that pay dividends, bonds that accrue interest, a stake in a business that grows.
You do almost nothing, and something comes back to you.
On the other side, assets that cost.
They're the possessions that, while you own them, ask you for money: the car, with road tax, insurance, maintenance and fuel; the house you live in, with taxes and expenses; the second home at the seaside you use three weeks a year.
Here it's you working for them, not the other way around.
In Cashfulness I've called them Assets+ and Assets-, but the concept is exactly the one from the book.
And there's a subtlety worth repeating, because it fools almost everyone. A possession that goes up in market value does not thereby become an asset that produces, if you're the one using it.
The house you live in may well appreciate 30%, but as long as you live there it doesn't put a euro in your pocket: it asks you for expenses. It remains an asset that costs. It becomes an asset that produces only on the day it starts giving you a flow — for instance, if you rent it out.
This distinction was in the book. It's in the app. I haven't touched it by a comma.
What the app adds that a book cannot give
So then, if the thinking is the same, why did I spend years building an application instead of just reprinting the book?
For a reason that has to do with the difference between knowing something and doing it every week without effort.
A book teaches you the method. Then it closes, and the method rests on your shoulders.
You have to open a spreadsheet or an accounting program, build the chart of accounts by hand, record every movement, and — above all — do the math to know where you stand. Every time. The knowledge is there; so is the effort.
Almost everyone, after the first few weeks of enthusiasm, gives up. Not out of laziness: out of friction. I know because it happened to me too, and because I've seen it happen to people who had read the book and liked it.
The app removes the friction at three precise points.
First: the coordinate updates itself.
In the book, to know what you're really worth, you had to stop and do the sum: everything you own, minus everything you owe. That number is called net worth, and it's your financial position at a given instant — what in Cashfulness I call your position fix.
In Cashfulness you don't calculate it. Every transaction you record automatically updates the coordinate, because underneath there's the double-entry engine running the accounts in real time.
You open the app, and the figure is already there. You don't have to earn it first with half an hour of arithmetic.
Second: the engine checks the balancing, not you.
In the book, verifying that Debits and Credits matched was your manual task, and it was also the point where it was easiest to give up.
In Cashfulness that check — called balancing — is inside the engine. The two sides of every entry must balance, and if something doesn't add up the error surfaces, instead of staying hidden at the bottom of a spreadsheet.
This means something important: your net worth is true. It's not an optimistic estimate; it doesn't forget the €5.20 coffee or the installment that slipped your mind. Nothing escapes, because everything must balance.
Third: you see the ratio between what produces and what costs.
In the book, the distinction between the two families of possessions was a concept you had to keep in mind.
In Cashfulness you classify each possession when you create it — asset that produces or asset that costs — and then the dashboard shows you, by itself, the ratio between the two categories, as a percentage.
At a glance you know which direction you're heading in over the long run: toward more things that work for you, or toward more things you work for.
A book explains the distinction to you once. The app puts it back in front of you every time you open the screen.
The tool changed, the thinking didn't
There's a point on which I want to be entirely transparent, because I've already written it elsewhere on this blog and I don't want to hide it here.
In the book, as the working tool, I recommended a free and open-source accounting program. It was — and still is — a good choice: solid, serious, at no cost.
I recommended it in complete good faith, for a simple reason: when I wrote that book, Cashfulness didn't exist yet.
Why, then, did I build Cashfulness, if a good alternative was already there?
Because that software, however valid, was born for people who already speak accounting. It asks you to know the jargon, to build everything by hand, to work almost exclusively from a computer.
Cashfulness inherits the exact same rigor of double-entry — the book's rigor, the rigor of 1494 — but it's designed for people who aren't accountants.
The real terms are all there — Debit, Credit, balancing — and you find them whenever you want.
But someone starting from zero can begin with simpler words — money in, money out, everything adds up — and the technical terms arrive explained, at first encounter, without ever being dumbed down.
Because simplicity doesn't mean removing substance. It means removing the friction, leaving the substance intact.
And then there are things that software designed for the desktop does with difficulty, and that today I take for granted: data aligned between phone and computer without my doing anything, the coordinate in my pocket when I need it, privacy built in from the very start of the project.
The point I care about getting across is this: the book's reasoning remains entirely valid. Indeed, with Cashfulness it holds all the more.
The book hasn't aged. What changed, for the better, is the tool I recommend for putting it into practice — not the thinking underneath.
If you read the book today, mentally replace that old software with Cashfulness. The method is identical; the experience, far simpler.
An example, to make it concrete
Let's take an example, with invented numbers.
Giulia read the book a few years ago. She liked it; she even opened an accounting program on her laptop and kept her accounts for a couple of months.
Then one month she skipped. Then two. By year's end the file lay still, and the idea of catching up on six months of movements had become a wall.
She knew the method. But the method, on its own, weighed too much.
Today Giulia records movements as they happen, in a few seconds, from her phone.
She no longer adds up her wealth: she reads it already done. Her net worth — say €84,000 — is there every time she opens the app, updated, balanced.
And when she looks at the mix of her assets, she sees something she previously only sensed: the bulk of her wealth is made of things that cost her — the car, the furnishings — and little of things that earn for her.
It's not a grade, it's not an alarm. It's information.
It tells her which way she might move, calmly, over the coming years. The book's method, at last, lives on its own — without demanding an act of willpower from her every week.
That is, in one sentence, the passage from the book to the app: not a different method, the same method that stops being a burden.
The thread that holds the two together
The book and the app say the same thing, from two different points in time.
Both start from an idea that, for me, comes before technique: money is a tool for buying time and freedom — not a dream to chase, nor an enemy to fight.
Double-entry, the assets that produce and the ones that cost, net worth: they're means for thinking about money less, not more. For having it in order, and then going back to living.
The book put this thinking on paper.
Cashfulness tries to turn it into a gesture of a few minutes a week, instead of a task that depends on your discipline.
If you've read the book, here you'll find its soul again — with the friction removed.
If you haven't, it doesn't matter: the app brings you the same method, and the book stays there, for anyone who wants to understand the why behind the how.
If you want to go deeper into the method
The thinking behind Cashfulness I put down in black and white, years ago, in a book: Strategie per la Finanza Personale (in Italian). It's a practical manual on double-entry bookkeeping applied to household accounts.
Keep one thing in mind as you read it: the tool I recommend in those pages I now replace with Cashfulness — the method, though, is identical.
The book is available on Amazon.
— Vittorio