We Built BizBooks Pro Because We Were Tired Too

Ken started young and never stopped. He founded a construction company, then built a real estate investment organization — the Beckwitt Real Estate Method — that grew to more than 100 partners. Today he's a partner in a real estate development firm, where he personally runs the finance, accounting, and closing operations. Along the way, he spent a decade as a software developer building financial software.

Early on, Ken fell for the part of business most owners dread: the accounting and the taxes. He didn't just learn it — he took it over completely, and he still keeps his own books and files his own returns to this day.

That's the vantage point BizBooks Pro is built from — an owner who lives in the books, not a vendor who's never used them.

For nearly three decades, Ken ran his companies on QuickBooks Desktop. He'd buy Desktop Pro for $299 — often less a $100 discount — and it would serve him a good three years before he upgraded. It barely changed, and that was fine. It was stable, and it was predictable.

Then it wasn't. Intuit pushed him onto yearly renewals and raised the price far faster than even today's steep inflation, for software that still hadn't meaningfully changed. Now Intuit has stopped selling QuickBooks Desktop Pro to new customers, ships no new versions of it, and keeps raising the renewal while steering everyone toward QuickBooks Online. Ken keeps a full, separate set of books for 16 companies — some netting only a few hundred dollars a year. "Everyone online" meant 16 separate online subscriptions, one per entity. Do that math and — holy cow. It was simply unaffordable, and he didn't even like the online product.

So he built the alternative he wished existed — one that cuts the cost immediately and then keeps it there:

• A 12-year price lock — a single, far lower annual price that holds steady through the next business cycle and beyond.
• Nearly every feature you'd find scattered across competitors, gathered in one place, without aggressive gating.
• Frequent updates and fast turnaround on the feature requests that matter.
• Industry verticals — construction, real estate, law firms, travel agencies and more — each with its own tailored corner of the software to work from.
• Dedicated Nonprofit and Government editions — full products in their own right, built around the fund accounting and compliance tools those organizations actually require.
• Room to grow from a solo freelancer to global, mid-sized operations without $50,000-a-year enterprise systems.
• Original tools he dreamed up over the years, like PayFlow and ServiceHub.

But more than any single feature, Ken built BizBooks Pro around a conviction he holds fiercely: a software company should be relentlessly, almost stubbornly, on its customers' side. He reads every message that comes through support — every question, every feature request — personally. Valuable ideas don't languish in a queue; they get built. His goal is simple and unapologetically ambitious: that once you make BizBooks Pro your home, you'll never want to leave it for the rest of your working life, because it's everything you hoped accounting software could be — and then more.

The industry verticals are where that conviction gets tested, and every one of them came from one of exactly two places: a professional who works in that trade showed us how they actually do it, or we spent days researching it until we could see the workaround for ourselves. No vertical has ever been shipped on a hunch. Two of them needed no research at all — Ken founded a construction company, and he runs the finance and closing operations for a property development firm today, so the pay application rebuilt in a spreadsheet every month and the commission split journaled by hand at closing are chores he has done with his own hands.

The travel agency edition is the clearest case of the first kind, and it changed how he thinks about all of them. It was built alongside a working host agency that had run on QuickBooks Desktop for almost thirty years — and reality turned out to be stranger than any amount of research would have suggested. Every booking took two invoices, and the first one was a pure fiction: a document that existed only to make a report come out right, carrying a contra line that cancelled its own income so the books stayed correct. Nobody designs that. It accumulates, one workaround at a time, over decades — and then somebody does it a few hundred times a year, forever.

So now the booking posts its own commission entry, and the invoice that existed only to satisfy a report is simply gone. That is the standard the rest of the verticals are held to, and the reason there is a standing invitation on this site: if you are in a trade we have built for and we got a detail wrong, or your industry isn't here yet, come and tell us. Somebody who does the work daily beats the most thorough research every time, and those conversations go straight onto the roadmap. Every industry edition is included from the Professional tier upward — none of them costs a penny extra.

That passion is still exactly what drives the roadmap, every single day. It is also how we measure ourselves: our first $100 million is counted in what our customers save, not in what we collect.

Kenneth A. Beckwitt Founder, BizBooks Pro

Ken lives in Fairfax Station, Virginia, with his wife, their three daughters (including a set of twins), and two dogs — and yes, he still keeps the family's books too.