QuickBooks Self-Employed is gone: what to use instead

You did not choose to switch bookkeeping apps. Intuit discontinued QuickBooks Self-Employed and moved everyone to QuickBooks Solopreneur — a different product, on the vendor’s timeline, not yours. For a lot of people the migration arrived carrying only about a year of transactions, couldn’t bring the old invoices along, and the app you’d been using was pulled. Years of your own numbers turned out to be held by a company that changed the product from under you. If you’re standing in that gap right now, the order of operations matters: get your data out first, then pick something this can’t happen to again.

What actually happened to QuickBooks Self-Employed?

Intuit retired QuickBooks Self-Employed and steered its customers into QuickBooks Solopreneur, positioned as the newer product for people running a business of one. The problem wasn’t that a new product exists — it’s that the handoff was lossy.

Three things caught people out:

• Only part of the history came across. Many users found roughly a single year of transactions migrated, not the full record they’d built up.
• Invoices didn’t move. The migration couldn’t carry invoices over, so a core part of the books simply didn’t survive the transition.
• The old app went away. Once QuickBooks Self-Employed was pulled, there was no going back to re-export what got left behind.

None of this was your mistake. It’s the built-in risk of books that live on someone else’s server: the vendor decides when the product changes, and you find out after.

Export everything before you lose access

If you still have any access to your old data, treat it as a closing window and get it out today. Don’t wait for a deadline you can’t see.

1. Transactions → CSV. Export the full transaction list for every year available, not just the current one. CSV opens anywhere and imports into almost anything.
2. Invoices → PDF. Download each invoice as a PDF while you still can. If there’s a bulk export, use it; if not, save them one by one. This is the data most likely to vanish in a migration.
3. Tax summaries and reports → PDF. Grab your Schedule C summaries, profit-and-loss, and any estimated-tax figures for prior years.
4. Store it where you control it. Put the files on your own device or drive — not solely inside another app’s account, where the same thing can happen again.

Once these are safe, you’ve bought yourself the freedom to choose calmly instead of under a shutdown clock.

Why an on-device ledger can’t be discontinued or capped

Here’s the part worth slowing down on. The migration hurt because your books lived somewhere a business decision could reach them. Change the architecture and you change the risk.

When records are kept on a vendor’s server, three levers always sit in someone else’s hands: they can retire the product, cap your history to whatever they choose to carry forward, and force a migration on their schedule. That’s not a QuickBooks flaw specifically — it’s what “cloud account” means.

An app that keeps your books on your own device removes all three levers at once. There’s no account for a vendor to sunset. There’s no server-side copy that a migration has to rebuild, so there’s nothing to truncate to one year. And nobody can move your data on their timeline, because they never held it. The company could disappear entirely and your numbers would still be sitting on your phone, exactly as you left them.

That’s the difference between trusting a vendor not to pull the rug and not having a rug to pull.

Where Keel fits

Keel is built so this can’t happen to you again. Your books live in an on-device, append-only, hash-chained ledger — no account for a vendor to sunset, no forced migration, no one-year cap. Every entry you ever make stays on your iPhone, tamper-evident, whether or not you pay. When you’re ready, you can rebuild your invoicing and set aside for taxes on a foundation nobody can discontinue. A product can be retired. A private ledger in your own hands cannot.