Most small-business bookkeeping fails not from laziness but from misplaced effort. Owners burn out categorizing hundreds of tiny transactions while the numbers that actually move profit go unexamined.

The 80/20 method flips this. Roughly 80% of your expense dollars come from a handful of big items: rent, payroll, software, inventory. Register those few items each month and you've captured most of the story.

The rest? Bundle it. Everything un-tagged lands in "General Business Expenses" on your income statement. You know that you spent $212 on odds and ends — you just don't know on what, and for a one-person business, that's fine.

Pair monthly big-item entry with an end-of-month cash confirmation and your profit number becomes mathematically locked in. That's NapkinLedger.