The safest place for your books is the one nobody else can get into.
GBooks Air has no backend and no account system. Here's exactly how that works, and what it actually means for you.
Local-first, on purpose
GBooks Air stores your entire company file in your browser's IndexedDB, a local database built into every modern browser. No server holds your financial data, because there's no server involved in your books at all. Nothing to breach, because there's nothing to find.
Receipt OCR never leaves your browser
Scanning runs on the Tesseract.js engine, client-side, in your browser. Your receipt images are never uploaded anywhere to be read — same privacy model as everything else in the app.
AES-256-GCM encryption
When you back up, your data gets encrypted with AES-256-GCM, the same class of encryption behind online banking, before it's ever written to a file. Your passphrase derives the key through PBKDF2, and a hex recovery key gets generated in case that passphrase slips your mind.
Your Google Drive, your call
Connect Google Drive for backup storage and files get encrypted before they're uploaded, so Google only ever sees ciphertext. The Drive is yours. Nobody at GSH Financial can see into it, or into your data.
What this actually means for you
- No account to create, and no password sitting on a server waiting to be breached
- Nobody can be subpoenaed for data they never held in the first place
- Your books are only as available as your own backup habits — which is why we've tried to make that part painless
- Data lives on a specific browser, on a specific device. Moving to a new one means restoring a backup, not logging in somewhere new
Your responsibility, made simple
Going local-first shifts some weight onto your own backup discipline in a way a cloud app wouldn't. We tried to build that in as something easy rather than optional: a one-click encrypted backup, a recovery key you tuck away somewhere safe, and an optional Google Drive connection so there's an automatic off-device copy sitting quietly in the background.
Set up your backup →Questions people actually ask
Does GSH Financial ever see my financial data?
No. There's no server in the loop for your books at all — the app runs entirely in your browser, and nothing about your normal use of it gets sent to GSH Financial or anyone else.
What happens if I lose my passphrase and my recovery key?
An encrypted backup without either one is, by design, unopenable — including by us. That's the trade-off of real client-side encryption: nobody holds a spare key, which also means nobody can hand yours back to you. Write the recovery key down somewhere the moment you make your first backup.
Is this actually safer than a cloud bookkeeping app?
It's a different set of risks more than a strictly safer one. Going local removes the risk of a centralized server breach entirely, but it puts backups on your shoulders instead of a company's. We think that trade is worth it, and we've tried to make the backup side genuinely easy to keep up with.