About
Aethelgard was built by a Registered Accountant (Koninklijke NBA) who spent twenty-five years telling clients the right tool didn't exist — and finally decided to build it.
Founder, Aethelgard
The founding story
A client arrives — sometimes with folders, sometimes with a number in their head — and when you ask them to walk through everything they own, precisely, there's a long pause. They know they own things. They just don't know — completely, and in one place — what those things are, what they're worth, and how they relate to each other.
That's not unusual. It's the normal state for founders and families managing real complexity: companies, property, pensions, investments in multiple currencies, carried interest, assets across jurisdictions that grew over time without a plan.
The problem isn't intelligence or effort. The problem is that no tool exists that's right for this use case. So people patch together spreadsheets, outsource the complexity to their accountant, and hope the gaps don't matter.
They do matter.
The tool gap
When clients asked what they should use to manage this complexity, there were only three answers. None of them were right.
YNAB, Copilot, Emma
Useful for tracking monthly expenses. Not designed for multi-entity wealth, multi-currency complexity, or IFRS-aligned accounting. Not built to last decades.
Xero, QuickBooks, FreeAgent
Excellent for SME bookkeeping, invoicing, payroll. Not built for a private individual tracking a holding company, a property portfolio, and an ISA as a unified picture. Cloud-first by design — your complete financial life on someone else's server.
Addepar, Dynamo, Masttro
These exist. They cost £50,000–£200,000 per year. Built for institutions, not individuals. They require professional implementation and a dedicated team to maintain.
The gap — between consumer budgeting app and institutional platform — is enormous. The people who fall into it are exactly the people who most need a serious tool.
Aethelgard fills that gap.
The privacy decision
Your net worth, your asset structure, your entity relationships — this is among the most sensitive information that exists about you. It tells the full story of your financial life. It reveals your vulnerabilities and your resources.
It is exactly the kind of information that should not live on a server you don't control — subject to data breaches, government requests, or simply the commercial decisions of a software company you've never met.
Aethelgard runs on your device. Backups are encrypted with AES-256 by default; optional SQLCipher AES-256 at-rest encryption is available. There is no telemetry. There is no background sync unless you configure it yourself. When we say "your data never leaves your device," we mean it architecturally, not just as a marketing claim.
AES-256 encrypted vault
Your data is an encrypted SQLite file on your machine. No one else can read it — including us.
Zero telemetry
No usage analytics, no crash reporting, no background calls. The app makes no network requests unless you configure WebDAV backup.
SHA-256 hash chain
Every journal entry is cryptographically linked to the previous. Tampering with any historical record breaks the chain immediately.
Your backup, your cloud
Optionally sync encrypted backups to your own Nextcloud, NAS, or any WebDAV-compatible storage. You control where it goes.
The succession problem
"At some point — for all of us — someone else will need to understand what we own."
That person will arrive at this task at a moment of grief or urgency. They will need to know: what did you own? Where is it? How much is it worth? Who manages it?
If you can't answer that question yourself clearly, in one place, right now — how will they answer it?
The records that people leave their successors are almost universally inadequate. Statements from last year. A spreadsheet that made sense when it was created. Contact names for advisors who may have retired. The systematic, complete mapping of wealth — the conversation that should happen while it can happen — almost never does.
Aethelgard is, at one level, an accounting application. At another level, it is the answer to that conversation.
A single, complete, cryptographically verified record of everything you own — structured properly, tamper-evident, in a form that someone else could understand and act on.
What was built
Aethelgard is a double-entry accounting application — which means every transaction balances, every change is recorded, and the ledger is fully auditable. It supports multiple entities: companies, trusts, personal accounts, all in one encrypted vault. It handles multiple currencies with IFRS-aligned FX revaluation.
The accounting model is correct, not approximate. It was built by a Registered Accountant (Koninklijke NBA), Drs Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. The features — depreciation, accruals, hedge accounting, deferred tax, group consolidation, period locks, illiquid asset revaluations — are implemented as they would be in a professional accounting environment.
It runs entirely on your machine. The vault is your file. You can back it up, move it, and own it completely. There is no subscription lock-in for the features themselves — the ledger you build is yours indefinitely.
No account required. No credit card. Full Corporate features from day one. If you manage serious wealth and want clarity without surrendering privacy — this is what it looks like.
30-day trial · No account · Your data never leaves your device