What is livre-des-recettes?

Livre des recettes is a simple local application built for French micro entrepreneurs, the self employed status common in France, to replace the spreadsheet many of them use to track their income and purchases for legal record keeping. It runs entirely on your own computer with no account and no internet connection needed, and it is meant to do one job well rather than act as a full accounting or invoicing system. French micro entrepreneurs are legally required to keep a chronological record of every payment they receive, called the livre des recettes, and if they buy and resell goods, a second record of their purchases, the registre des achats. This app covers both in one place, with guided entry, automatic totals, and record numbering checks that warn about duplicates or gaps without ever blocking your work. It also lets you save a client list so professional clients can be looked up automatically by their official French business registration number, and it flags recurring or very similar entries to help avoid accidental duplicate records. A dashboard shows monthly and yearly revenue, the number of payments received, and total purchases, along with a chart of revenue over time. Because micro entrepreneur status has income limits and VAT thresholds, the app tracks your progress toward those limits and warns you as you approach them, splitting the numbers by activity type if you both sell goods and provide services, since each has its own rules. It can also estimate the social security contributions due for a given period based on your declared activity type, entirely as a local calculation, with no direct connection to the French social security agency. Everything can be exported as PDF, Excel, or CSV files formatted to match legal requirements, complete with monthly and yearly totals, and the app reviews common compliance checks before every export. It also keeps automatic backups and can import your existing spreadsheet history through CSV files. The easiest way to run it is downloading a ready made executable for your operating system with nothing else to install, though it can also be run from source using Node.js. The project is released under the MIT license.