QuickBooks Self-Employed is gone. Here is a practical replacement guide.

If you built your records on QuickBooks Self-Employed, you've probably already felt the ground move. Intuit pulled the product from sale back in 2024 and has been steering everybody toward QuickBooks Solopreneur since. For a lot of independent contractors, that migration didn't go smoothly.

What actually happened

The official migration moved less than most people expected. Users reported that receipts and invoices didn't come across, that only about a year of transactions transferred, and that connected bank accounts pulled a limited window of history. When your records live in an app you no longer control, that's a real problem at tax time. The IRS expects you to hold on to supporting documentation for years, not months.

The bigger lesson here isn't about Intuit. It's that your expense records should be portable. Whatever tool you pick next, make sure you can get everything back out of it, in a standard format, whenever you want.

What to look for in a replacement

A few things matter more than the rest when you're on your own:

• Receipt capture that does the typing for you. Snapping a photo should fill in the merchant, the amount, and the date. Retyping receipts is how tracking habits die.
• Tax-year tagging and a Schedule C-friendly export. Your categories should map to how you actually file, and exporting a full year should take seconds.
• A way in for your old data. CSV import matters twice: once to bring history over from your last tool, and then every month afterward for bank transactions.
• Mileage and reimbursement tracking. Small line items add up to real deductions.
• A price that fits a one-person business. You're not running payroll. You shouldn't have to pay like you are.

Moving your data without losing sleep

1. Export everything from QuickBooks now, while you still have access. Transactions as CSV, plus any receipt images you can download. Do this even if you haven't settled on a replacement yet.
2. Import the CSV into the new tool. Whittle reads the common bank and accounting export formats, matches the columns for you, and turns anything unmatched into draft expenses you approve in bulk.
3. Spot-check one month. Pick a month, compare the totals between your old export and the new tool, and confirm the categories landed where you expected them to.
4. Start snapping receipts from here on. History is for taxes. The habit is what keeps next year easy.

Where Whittle fits

I built Whittle for more or less this exact situation: independent contractors who want expense tracking, budgets, and tax-time exports without a whole accounting suite bolted around them. AI receipt scanning fills in an expense from a photo, every expense carries a tax year, reports export cleanly for Schedule C, and bank CSV import brings your history along with you. There's a free plan with no time limit on it, paid plans start at $5 a month, and the 14-day trial of the full product needs no card.

If you're comparing options side by side, we keep an honest comparison page here: Whittle as a QuickBooks Self-Employed alternative.