From Notebook to hosting an Property Rental LLC Accounting App with Claude
A story about a 2 month journey into real estate, double-entry bookkeeping, and the surprisingly philosophical experience of debugging session cookies - an 8hr session. The Setup (No Pun Intended) It started simple enough. A multi-member real estate LLC. A single rental property for my daughter. A shared need to track income, expenses, depreciation, and eventually file IRS Form 1065 with Schedule K-1s for each partner. The existing workflow: a tangle of Jupyter notebooks, Excel sheets, and a shared Google Drive folder with files named things like `LLC-WB-Group_Final_FINAL_v3.xlsx`. Maintainable by no one. Auditable by no one. Tax-season panic every year. The goal: a proper double-entry ledger, automated IRS form population, and a (python Flask) web editor so any partner could review the books from anywhere —hosted on .com PythonAnywhere, so there's no server to babysit. The plan: build it with Claude. Two months later, we have version `v0.7.0` with the LLC editor app/views ...