We build the tools a small business runs on — and then we hand them over. Your books live on your infrastructure, under your control, and they stay yours whether or not you stay our customer.
Most business software is rented. You put a decade of invoices, payroll records and customer history into a system you cannot see, cannot copy in full, and cannot keep — and the price goes up because leaving is harder than paying. The data that describes your business ends up as leverage against you.
We think that is backwards, and VectorSums exists to build the other thing: business software that is precise enough to trust with money and structured so that you never need our permission to reach your own records.
In practice that is three commitments, and each one costs us something, which is how you can tell they are real.
VLedg installs on a machine you control — a server in the back office, a box in a rack, a VM in your own cloud account — and the database is yours. We do not hold a copy. We could not hand your books to anyone, be compelled to produce them, or lose them in a breach of ours, because they were never on our systems.
If you would rather not run a server, we will host it for you — and then that paragraph stops being true, so we say so rather than letting it stand. On a managed deployment the machine and the database are ours to operate, which means they are also ours to be breached or subpoenaed. It is the same software either way and your data is still yours to export and keep — but the strongest guarantee we offer is a property of self-hosting, and we will not pretend otherwise. If the distinction matters to your business, ask us and we will walk you through exactly what each arrangement means.
When you self-host, the cost to us is that we cannot do the things hosted vendors do: no quiet schema migrations, no reading your data to debug your problem, no usage analytics to steer the roadmap. We ship a manual and a support inbox instead.
Nothing in VLedg counts your people. Not the login screen, not the permissions system, not the licence check. Add the whole team, add a second shift, add the bookkeeper and the accountant — the price does not move, because there is no per-user meter to move it. What a licence does size is how many separate deployments it covers and how many companies live inside one — so if you run two locations on two machines, that is the number to ask us about. Tell us your setup and we will tell you exactly which plan covers it.
Saying this publicly is the point. A per-seat meter is the easiest revenue lever in software, and the reason to write the commitment down where customers can hold us to it is that we would otherwise be tempted by it later.
Underneath the invoicing, payroll, point of sale and job costing there is one double-entry general ledger, and it is immutable: corrections post reversing entries rather than editing history, so every figure can be traced to the event that caused it. Period close, opening balances, a trial balance and a real audit trail are part of the product rather than an upgrade. Your CPA can be given their own scoped, revocable login on any plan; the larger plans add a dedicated accountant workspace.
VectorSums is a small, independent software company. We are not venture-funded, we do not sell data, and we do not have an advertising business that your records would quietly feed. We make money one way: businesses buy a licence, and buy a subscription that keeps it updated and supported.
That is a deliberately boring business model, and it is the one that keeps the incentives pointing the same direction as yours. We do better when the software is worth renewing — not when leaving is expensive.
VLedg is the first product: invoicing, expenses, banking, payroll and benefits, point of sale, inventory, jobs and costing, hiring, scheduling, client portals and financial reporting — one platform on one ledger, rather than six subscriptions that almost reconcile. See what it does →
More will follow, on the same principle. If you want to know where it is going, or whether it fits how your business actually works, the fastest answer is to ask us — you will get a person.