I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs accidentally make a mess inside of QuickBooks — or avoid it for long that it becomes a liability — that their bookkeeping becomes too difficult to fix simply by moving through the Chillbooks™ program.

If you start taking your finances seriously from Day 1, you won’t have to spend the first few years of your business living with the stress of not understanding those finances, and you won’t have to pay someone thousands of dollars to help you clean them up either. 

Bottom line: It can all be avoided! The earlier you set up your books — and set them up the right way — the better. 

Why QuickBooks Online?

QuickBooks Online is the system I teach because it directly tackles the two things solopreneurs care about most: saving on tax and avoiding stress.

What this looks like in real life:

• GST/HST done right: QuickBooks tracks sales tax automatically and preps your return so you don’t miss credits.

• Bank feeds & rules: Transactions flow in automatically. Recurring expenses like Canva or Zoom get categorized without you doing a thing.

• Receipts attached forever: Snap a pic and it’s stored with the expense. CRA asks? You’re ready in seconds.

• Clear reports: At a glance, you can see: “Did I actually make money this month?” or “Am I on track over the past 12 months?” No building custom spreadsheets or trying to piece numbers together.

• Audit trail: If something changes, QuickBooks records who changed it and when.

• Accountant collaboration: Your accountant already knows QuickBooks, which means faster year-end, fewer mistakes, and lower fees.

QuickBooks is like insurance for your finances — it keeps you organized even if you don’t love bookkeeping.

Why not just use Wave — it’s free?

Wave looks free — but if you actually want the features that matter (bank feeds, receipt scanning), you’ll need to pay for their Pro Plan or add-ons. At that point, you’re paying monthly anyway.

The bigger issue: Wave starts to break down when it comes to Canadian sales tax and reporting. Even something simple like looking at your profit and loss month-by-month over the year is clunky or impossible. That makes it harder to answer basic questions like: “Was I actually profitable this quarter?” or “Am I earning more now than I was a year ago?”

Add to that: most accountants aren’t well-versed in Wave. They live in QuickBooks. Which means one of two things:

• They’ll export your data and rebuild it in QuickBooks anyway (extra work = higher fees).

• Or they’ll work inside Wave but miss things, which can create errors on your return.

Either way, Wave usually costs more in stress, cleanup, and accountant time than it saves.

Why not just use Excel?

Excel is fantastic for budgeting or one-off analysis, but for actual bookkeeping it creates more stress:

• No bank feeds, so you’re typing every transaction.

• Easy to break formulas without realizing it.

• Hard to handle GST/HST consistently.

• Building simple reports (like “Did I make money each month this year?”) takes manual work — and even then, you can’t be sure it’s right.

It feels “free,” but usually ends up costing you more in missed deductions and higher accountant bills.

What about the cost of QuickBooks?

Most Chillbooks students use the QuickBooks EasyStart Package. Here is the most up to date pricing.

The real cost isn’t the subscription fee. It’s:

• Time spent fixing errors.

• Higher accountant bills.

• Missed write-offs or sales tax mistakes.

• The stress of not knowing what you’ll owe.

QuickBooks pays for itself when it helps you:

• Claim deductions you’d otherwise miss.

• Stay on top of sales tax so you avoid penalties.

• Cut down accountant time at year-end.

What if I’m switching over from Wave?

Welcome to the club! Many Chillbooks students started in Wave and later moved into QuickBooks.

The sooner you switch, the sooner you’ll have everything in one clean system with history you can build on. You’ve got two options:

• Import your data from Wave so all your past transactions carry over.

• Start fresh from a specific date (like January 1 or June 30) and keep Wave as an archive.

Both approaches work. What matters most is that from the day you switch, you’re building your bookkeeping on a system designed to reduce stress, keep your taxes accurate, and grow with your business.

👉 TLDR: QuickBooks Online makes tax season easier, keeps your books clean, generates helpful reports and saves you money. Wave and Excel feel cheaper, but reporting is clunky, most accountants don’t use them, and they usually lead to more stress, more errors, and more fees in the long run.

You can outsource it — but I still recommend educating yourself first.

Because while you can pay someone to crunch the numbers and to report them to the CRA, you are ultimately the one responsible for the validity of those numbers. And you can’t ensure that validity if you don’t understand the basics.

That’s why my recommendation is for business owners to always start with education — you don’t need to become an accountant or a tax pro, but you do need to know enough to be able to review your books, your write-offs, and your tax filings for accuracy.

And I promise that Chillbooks™ makes those basics easy to understand — even if you’d rather not touch the finance side of your business with a ten-foot pole.

Briana, a Chillbooks™ alum, had this worry too. She said, “As someone who struggles with math and accounting concepts, Jami really explains things in a straightforward way that makes sense.” 

Teagan, another alum, said: “This woman and what she has created has made me feel so empowered to do my business finances myself.  The way Jami explains all this stuff is so easy to understand and digest. I cannot recommend Jami and her program Chillbooks enough!!!”

Absolutely! I’ve heard from Chillbooks™ students, like Tamara, who’ve had QBO for years and still found immense value in the program. She said:

“I wanted to use the software, QuickBooks, that I’ve been paying for for years [and it] had so much more to offer than I realized, and I’m saving money every month now.” 

With the comprehensive QuickBooks training videos inside this course, you’ll better understand the software you’re already paying for and be able to tweak your current setup to optimize your monthly process. 

Plus, Chillbooks™ is so much more than just a “how to use QuickBooks” course. We’ll also go deep into bookkeeping basics and tax basics so you can build an overall stronger financial foundation for your business.

There’s no “commitment,” but rather, options for you to choose from that best fit your schedule.

You can follow the 12-week learning path, which will require approximately 1 hour per week over the 12 weeks. Or you could stretch the timeline out however you see fit (even over a year if you’d like!). If you do have a backlog to work through, be sure to budget some extra time to get caught up!

It’s true! There are hundreds of tutorial videos available (though I did just try to click on one called “How to Categorize Transactions” and was redirected to an Error Page 😬)…

But knowing where to click in QuickBooks is only one piece of the puzzle.

Because to actually use QuickBooks properly as a Canadian solopreneur, you also need to understand the basic bookkeeping and tax concepts behind what you’re doing.

What counts as a business expense? How should something be categorized? What does GST/HST have to do with it? What should you actually be looking at in your reports?

The software can’t make those decisions for you.

And sure, you’ll find 54,447+ conversations in the Q&A forum on the QuickBooks website that you can search through (I added them up in August 2026, so let’s be real, there are probably more now)…

But do you really have time to dig into the archives each month, hoping to find an answer that even semi-makes sense for your business?

And the support desk can be helpful (if you can manage to find the phone number they’ve strategically hidden on their website 🙄)…

I will say that people, including fellow accountants, often tell me I know more about QuickBooks than the actual QuickBooks support staff 😉

And.. Chillbooks™ isn’t just QuickBooks training.

I teach you the software alongside the bookkeeping and Canadian tax basics you need to actually understand what you’re doing inside it.

Because learning which button to click doesn’t help much if you don’t know why you’re clicking it.

I know the software, the bookkeeping behind it, and what Canadian solopreneurs like you need to successfully put the whole system together.

And I’ve laid it all out in a way that earned the program this raving review from Natasha:

“As a certified teacher who’s neurodivergent, I can confidently say Jami has some of the best curriculum design I’ve seen in the online business space in the past five years.”