I remember seeing Clams a few years ago (or maybe just last year) and thinking that it was an interesting concept. Now it seems that they are out of beta (#1434616) with v1.
They identified three major problems with most attempts at doing bookkeeping/accounting for Bitcoin:
Transfers get mistaken for sales. When a tool counts a wallet-to-wallet transfer as a disposal, it invents a gain that never happened, distorts your cost basis, and you overpay.
Your data leaves your machine. On hosted platforms, your full transaction history sits on someone else's server, governed by their security practices and their policies.
Your books never actually close. The wallet balance matches, but the books don't. Other tools give you a number, not the double-entry bookkeeping a real business needs.
And the Clams guys believe they've solved these issues:
Clams solves all three. It matches high-confidence transfers automatically, including between on-chain and Lightning, and flags anything ambiguous for your review, so a move between your own wallets doesn't get booked as a disposal. Your accounting backend, ledger, and reports live on infrastructure you control, local or self-hosted; Clams uses hosted services only for identity, licensing, billing, and exchange rates. And it gives you real double-entry books, with a full audit trail behind every entry.
One interesting thing is that they are charging for their software:
I think this is a good choice and I will be very curious to see if they find traction.
Congrats I downloaded clams and tried to use it but it was too buggy for me! Glad to see the team didn’t give up on the project
Great work @ab! Super happy you all have kept with it. I think about you guys every time I touch the CLN rune decoder that you let us borrow.
Thanks @koob, yeah we have been chugging along making some really good progress and stoked to be out of beta now. Glad the CLN rune decoder is still being used and useful!