United States
IRS · Form 1040-ES
- Federal income tax and self-employment tax
- Quarterly estimated tax payments
- Qualified business income deduction
- Standard mileage rate
- Tax year: 1 January – 31 December
ProDesk Apps
CashDesk
Know what's actually yours.
Every budgeting app assumes a salary on the 1st and the 15th. Traders, freelancers and contractors don't have one — they spend gross and find out what they owe in April. CashDesk works the other way round: it watches what comes in, sets aside the tax that was never yours, and keeps the rest honest.
In development · Mac
Who It's For
Built for income that arrives in lumps.
If your income is the same every month, you don't need this. If it isn't, the three questions below are the ones that actually cost people money — and no salary-shaped budgeting app answers any of them.
Traders
Realised gains are not spending money. CashDesk separates what you've made from what you owe on it, and keeps the reserve moving as the year goes — instead of discovering the number when the return is due.
Freelancers & contractors
Quote a job, bill it, chase it, and know the day it falls due. Every invoice feeds straight into the income figure the tax reserve is calculated from — no second system to keep in step.
Sole traders & side businesses
One bank account, business and personal mixed together. CashDesk splits them, finds the deductions in the mix, and keeps the evidence attached to the claim.
Four Countries
Your tax system, in its own language.
Not one calculator with the country swapped out. Each jurisdiction brings its own tax year, its own contributions, its own instalment calendar and its own words — because a UK sole trader making "payments on account" and a US freelancer filing 1040-ES are not doing the same thing.
United Kingdom
HMRC · Self Assessment
- Income tax and Class 2 / Class 4 National Insurance
- Payments on account, and the balancing payment
- Personal allowance, including the taper
- VAT return figures and the registration threshold
- Tax year: 6 April – 5 April
Canada
CRA · Instalment reminders
- Federal income tax and CPP contributions
- March, June, September and December instalments
- GST/HST return figures
- Half-year rule on capital cost allowance
- Tax year: 1 January – 31 December
Australia
ATO · PAYG instalments
- Income tax and the Medicare levy
- Quarterly PAYG instalments
- GST, laid out in BAS label order
- Cents-per-kilometre method, with the annual cap
- Tax year: 1 July – 30 June
Features
Ten screens. One year's paperwork, done as you go.
The reserve
The headline number: how much of what you've earned this year was never yours. Recalculated on every import, with the next instalment and the date it falls due sitting underneath it.
- Income tax and contributions, worked separately and shown separately
- Effective rate on what you've earned, marginal rate on the next dollar
- Next instalment, with its own due date and the authority's own name for it
- Tells you when the figure is understated because transactions are still unclassified
Budget & calendar
What you planned to spend against what you actually did — month, quarter or year — on the one screen in the app that counts personal spending alongside business. "Can I afford this" cannot be answered from business figures alone.
- Month calendar with every day tinted by what happened on it
- Jobs and contracted periods drawn as bars you can drag across days
- Reminders and silent notes, with pause controls that keep the reminders and stop the noise
- Free cash shown after the tax reserve, never including it
Quoting & invoices
Quote a job, turn the quote into an invoice when you win it, and know the day it falls due. Built for people who bill for their own time and have no credit-control department behind them.
- Quotes, invoices, credit notes and deposits
- Recurring invoices for retainers — drafted, never sent without you
- Aging by client, so you can see who pays and who takes three months
- Statements of account, ready to paste into an email
- Quote templates by trade, with terms, deposits and the watch-outs
- Saved clients and a price list for the things you charge for often
Profit & loss
Month by month, and by each stream of work you do — because "am I making money" and "which part of this is making money" are different questions, and the second one is the one that changes what you do next.
- Revenue, expenses and net, by month and by trade
- Your own editable category structure, not a fixed chart of accounts
- Unclassified transactions excluded and counted, never quietly folded in
GST / VAT
Every figure your activity statement or VAT return asks for, laid out in the authority's own codes so it can be transcribed straight across. Nothing is calculated until you tell CashDesk you're registered — showing someone a liability they don't owe is worse than showing them nothing.
- BAS labels for Australia, VAT boxes for the UK, GST/HST for Canada
- Tax extracted from gross amounts correctly, not by multiplying the rate
- Registration threshold stated, with your turnover against it
- Nothing shown for the US, where sales tax is state and local — a single national figure would be invented
Mileage & assets
The two deductions people lose most of, because both are only claimable if you kept the record at the time.
- Business travel logged as you go, at your jurisdiction's rate and bands
- Annual distance caps applied where they exist
- Assets written down over years, not deducted whole in the month they were bought
- Straight line, declining balance and immediate write-off — each explained in plain English, with your own figure worked through it
- Business-use share applied, because half a laptop is half a deduction
Import, review & receipts
Bring in your own bank and broker statements as CSV. CashDesk works out the columns, classifies what it can from rules built for your trade, and puts the handful it won't guess at in a review queue — one click each.
- Column mapping inferred, then confirmed before anything is committed
- Re-importing an overlapping export doesn't duplicate the overlap
- Transfers between your own accounts recognised, so they're never taxed as income
- Receipts filed against the claim, with an iCloud folder you can drop photos into
- An accountant pack you can export when the year ends
How It Works
Four steps, then it keeps up with you.
Tell it what you do
What you do, how you get paid, where you pay tax. That sets your expense assumptions, your deduction categories and the rules used to classify what comes in.
Import your statements
Your own CSV exports from your bank and broker. No bank logins, no aggregator, no connection to break — which is also why it works in four countries on day one.
Clear the review queue
Anything the rules won't guess at comes to you, one row at a time, with the choices as buttons. A transfer misread as income taxes money you never earned, so it asks rather than assumes.
Watch the reserve
The set-aside figure, the next instalment and the return-ready totals stay current from then on. At year end, export the pack and send it to your accountant.
Privacy
Your bank data never leaves your Mac.
This isn't a policy position, it's the architecture. CashDesk has no account, no server and no bank connection: your ledger is a file on your own machine.
What that means in practice
No sign-up, no cloud sync of your transactions, no analytics on what you earn or spend. Nothing about your income is transmitted anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to go.
The app makes exactly one kind of network request: fetching signed updates to the tax tables when rates change. It sends no request body and carries no identifier — it asks for a public file, checks the signature, and applies it only if it's genuine.
What It Is, and Isn't
A tool for you and your accountant.
CashDesk prepares figures; it does not file returns and it is not a tax adviser. Nothing in it is tax, legal or financial advice, and where your circumstances differ from its assumptions — or your tax authority's rules differ from its figures — theirs are the ones that count.
It states its assumptions on screen rather than burying them: which method it applied, which threshold it used, what it left out and why. Where a figure would have to be invented to be shown, it is left blank and the reason is given.
Check the numbers against your authority's published figures, and take a professional's advice before you rely on them.
Coming Soon
Built for Mac.
CashDesk is a native macOS app, written in SwiftUI, sandboxed, and designed to be fast on a laptop with a decade of statements in it. Want to know when it ships?
Stop spending the tax office's money.
Budgeting, tax and invoicing for people whose income arrives in lumps — in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.