GigBooks and your kirjanpitäjä: who does what

A question we get often: “Do I need a kirjanpitäjä if I use GigBooks?” The honest answer is “it depends, and probably both for at least the first year.” This article lays out exactly what GigBooks does, what an accountant does, and where the line sits — with no pressure to subscribe before you’ve decided.

What GigBooks actually does, today

We’re explicit about scope so you can compare meaningfully.

Day-to-day:

• Logs your shifts (delivery, rideshare) and sessions (salon, tutoring, consulting), with platform earnings, costs, kilometres.
• Reads receipt photos and turns them into draft expense entries.
• Imports your Nordea or OP bank statement (PDF) and reconciles transactions against your entries.
• Tracks the €20,000 VAT line, your YEL run-rate, and your advance-tax progress on a dashboard.
• Answers questions about your books in chat — grounded in your actual numbers, not generic web text.

Period filings:

• Generates VAT period summaries (sales, purchases, net to file) for each closed reporting period.
• Lets you mark a period as filed once you’ve submitted in OmaVero.

Year-end:

• Generates a draft of your personal tax return’s business section — revenue, deductible expenses, advance tax paid, YEL deducted.

What it doesn’t do:

• It doesn’t connect to Wolt, Bolt, or Uber. It doesn’t read platform earnings automatically.
• It doesn’t have a live PSD2 bank connection — you upload PDF statements.
• It doesn’t file your VAT or annual tax return with Vero. You file in OmaVero.
• It doesn’t replace a kirjanpitäjä’s judgment in complicated situations (incorporation, big asset purchases, employees).

That’s the full surface. Anything you read about GigBooks that goes beyond this list is either marketing language for the same things, or a future feature we haven’t shipped yet.

What a kirjanpitäjä does

A Finnish kirjanpitäjä typically does three things for a toiminimi at platform-worker scale:

1. Sanity-check the year. They review your full year of bookkeeping before you file your personal tax return — looking for errors, missed deductions, weird entries, things that don’t reconcile. This is the highest-value hour of your year if your kirjanpitäjä is good.

2. File the personal tax return. They prepare the return in their professional system, file it in OmaVero on your behalf, and answer Vero’s follow-up questions if they come.

3. Advise on changes. When your work shifts (you start salon work alongside courier work, you cross the VAT line, you consider switching from toiminimi to osakeyhtiö), they tell you what to do and when. Most platform workers need this conversation 1–3 times a year.

A typical price for a toiminimi at platform-worker volume is €30–€60 per month if you have a continuous arrangement, or €100–€300 once a year for a year-end review and tax filing.

Where the line sits

There are roughly three patterns we see among Finnish platform workers:

Pattern A: app + once-a-year accountant. You do the day-to-day in GigBooks. In January or February, you book an hour with a kirjanpitäjä, they review your year, fix anything that needs fixing, and file your tax return. Your annual cost is the accountant’s hourly fee plus your GigBooks subscription. Most beginners and most steady-state platform workers fit this pattern well.

Pattern B: full accountant. You hand the kirjanpitäjä all your receipts and bank statements monthly, they do the books in their system, file periods and the annual return. You don’t need a tool. Higher monthly cost (€60–€150), but zero bookkeeping work for you. Sensible for people who genuinely don’t have the time or attention for the day-to-day, or who are running close to a complicated boundary (VAT line, employees, mixed personal/business).

Pattern C: app only. You do everything yourself, including filing in OmaVero. Cheapest. Realistic only if you’re comfortable reading Vero’s guidance and you have a simple year. Don’t underestimate the cost of a small mistake — a missed deduction or a wrong VAT period can outpace the price of a kirjanpitäjä.

For most platform workers we talk to, Pattern A is the sweet spot.

Why we built it for Pattern A

GigBooks is opinionated about supporting the accountant relationship, not replacing it. Concrete examples:

• The export function produces a per-year archive — journal, receipts, period summaries — that you can hand to a kirjanpitäjä in one zip. We’re explicitly designed to be auditable.
• The annual tax-return draft uses the same field structure as the OmaVero personal return. A kirjanpitäjä can review it in 15–30 minutes rather than rebuilding it from scratch.
• The draft → confirmed entry model and the correction-not-edit rule for confirmed entries are the Bookkeeping Act way. A kirjanpitäjä doesn’t have to “untangle” your books — they were never tangled.

Tools that try to replace accountants tend to be opaque about what they’re doing. We try to be the opposite: every decision is visible in the journal, every figure is traceable to a source receipt or bank row.

When GigBooks isn’t the right answer

If your situation is one of:

• You run an osakeyhtiö (limited company). GigBooks is built for toiminimi single-entry bookkeeping. An osakeyhtiö requires double-entry and has different filing rules. Use a tool built for osakeyhtiö (Procountor, Holvi, Fennoa) or a kirjanpitäjä.
• You have inventory. Platform service workers don’t, but if you’re running a side business that sells physical goods with stock, GigBooks’s inventory model is rudimentary. Better tools exist.
• You have employees. Payroll is a separate discipline. Combine GigBooks for the rest of the books with a payroll tool (Palkkaus.fi, etc.) or with a kirjanpitäjä.
• You bank with a non-supported Finnish bank. Today: Nordea or OP. We’re adding others. If you bank with Danske, S-Pankki, Aktia, or Handelsbanken, the bank import is on the roadmap but not shipped.

In any of these cases, your year is genuinely better served by a kirjanpitäjä than a tool. Be honest with yourself.

A reasonable first conversation with a kirjanpitäjä

If you’re starting out and you’re not sure what you need, the cheapest useful thing is one hour with a Finnish kirjanpitäjä, paid out of pocket. Bring:

• Your registration documents from YTJ.
• A rough idea of your monthly turnover.
• A list of the platforms you work on (or expect to work on).
• Your honest answer about how much time you’d put into the day-to-day yourself.

Ask them: “Given my situation, what’s the cheapest reasonable arrangement we could have, and what would change as I grow?” Most kirjanpitäjät will tell you straight. The good ones will tell you when you don’t need them yet.

Try GigBooks alongside the conversation

If you do want to try us — the beta is free. Sign up, finish the four-question onboarding, log a week or two of shifts, snap your fuel receipts, import a recent bank statement. After two weeks, you’ll know whether the day-to-day fits how you actually work.

Then you can have an informed conversation with a kirjanpitäjä about which of the three patterns suits you. We’d rather you make that decision with real data than because of any pitch on a marketing page.

Read next

• GigBooks docs: Welcome — the no-marketing version of what’s in the app today.
• Toiminimi bookkeeping basics — the wider context.
• The €20,000 VAT line — the most common reason you’d want a kirjanpitäjä in the loop.
• Accountant or app calculator — compare the costs of the three patterns.