The apps
Book’d Off
Shift rota calendar · Android, Wear OS and iPhone
A calendar can show you a shift. It can’t tell you how much annual leave you have left, what your TOIL balance is, or how many re-rostered rest days you’re still owed.
A shift rota calendar built around UK police rotas and the Police Regulations, though it works for any shift pattern. Build a repeating rota of any length across multiple teams, apply it to the calendar, and it keeps count of annual leave, TOIL, overtime, re-rostered rest days, bank holidays and mileage as you go. Home screen widgets show the week ahead on Android and iPhone, and Wear OS tiles put it on your wrist.
Everything is stored on your phone. Backups go to your own Google Drive if you switch that on. One-off payment for the Pro features; the rest is free — and the purchase is per store, so Pro bought on Google Play is separate from Pro bought on the App Store.
Brain Squid
Markdown notes · Local-only web app
I use Obsidian for my own notes, but I can’t install it on a work machine. So I built a web version that still keeps everything in local files.
Write markdown notes and link them together. Build tables, run data queries off YAML frontmatter, and draw diagrams. View or embed images, PDFs and HTML files. Search your text, tag notes, and open up to four at once in a split grid. Set your own theme, fonts and colours for each element.
It also does kanban boards with deadlines, status colours and checkboxes to track progress; a canvas to lay out notes, images and PDFs together; a graph view of how your notes connect; and it can build a PDF document out of several notes, in the order you choose, with a cover and contents page.
Free. Runs locally in your browser, reading and writing a folder you pick. Your notes are never uploaded and nothing is stored on the server.
The TimeTabler
Course timetables · Local-only web app
Building and editing course timetables by hand in Excel is slow, and every change means reformatting everything.
Set up the timetable — the date range, the working days and times, and the breaks. Add your subjects with their timings, group them by module, give them colours, and record staff, rooms and any notes. Link prerequisites, then plot everything onto the timetable automatically or place it by hand.
Handles subjects that run over several days and ones that repeat weekly or monthly, and individual days or whole weeks can be split into cohorts with different subjects each. The finished timetable saves to a single HTML file, so it can be viewed and shared by people who don’t use the app.
Free. Runs locally in your browser. Your timetable is never uploaded and nothing is stored on the server.
Folder Fabricator
Bulk folders and documents · Local-only web app
Every new intake meant building the same complex folder tree by hand, once per student, for their personnel files and records.
Load a spreadsheet of details, build the folder structure you want once as a template, and it creates every named folder for you. It can also drop template Word and Excel documents into each folder, and personalise those documents with the details from each record.
Free. Runs locally in your browser and writes straight into a folder on your machine. Your spreadsheet is never uploaded and nothing is stored on the server.
Invested
Portfolio visualisation for Trading 212 · Local-only web app
The Trading 212 app holds all the data but shows very little of it.
A stocks and shares portfolio visualisation app for Trading 212. It connects to your account through the Trading 212 API, with live stock data from Yahoo, and can also take an upload of your Trading 212 CSV exports. It then shows you everything your portfolio actually contains — holdings, valuations, orders, pies, dividends and the full history.
Free, and it runs locally in your browser like the others, with your data held in a file on your machine. One difference worth stating: Trading 212’s API can’t be called from a browser, so those requests pass through a small relay on the server. It only forwards the request and hands back the reply — nothing is read, kept or logged. You can also run that relay yourself and point the app at it, if you’d rather it never touched my server.
QuidVault
Your money in and out, plus Self Assessment · Local-only web app
Each bank app shows one account and nothing else. I wanted every account, card and budget in one place, with the sole-trader side of my tax worked out from the same statements — without handing a copy of them to anyone.
Import your bank and credit card statements — a CSV or Excel download with a column-mapping step, a downloaded PDF read straight off the page, or a scan — and QuidVault checks each one against the account’s balance before it writes a line. Set up your own categories with keywords and it files transactions for you, learns from the corrections you make, and pairs up transfers between your accounts. Set monthly budgets per category or group, and see where the money went in a cashflow diagram, spending over time, a treemap, a spending calendar, top payees and recurring payments. Receipts and payslips can be filed against the lines they belong to, and it can read your Invested vault to count your Trading 212 holdings alongside your accounts.
The Tax section is for a sole trader with a day job. Tag the lines that are business, drop in your payslips and P60s, and file receipts and invoices against them as HMRC evidence. It keeps a running estimate of the year — income tax, Class 2 and Class 4 National Insurance, payments on account, losses carried forward or set against your salary — lays the figures out box by box for the SA102 and SA103F, tracks a tax pot against what you will owe, and builds a pack for your accountant in one click. Scottish rates aren’t modelled yet, and the whole section can be switched off if you don’t need it.
Free. Runs locally in your browser, in a folder you choose, with the ledger and every document beside it. Downloaded PDF statements are read on your machine with no AI involved. Reading a scan, receipt or payslip, and suggesting categories if you switch that on, uses Mistral, sent straight from your browser with your own Mistral API key — it is optional, nothing passes through us, and without a key you type those figures in yourself.
Every figure it shows is for guidance only, not financial or tax advice. Check the tax estimate against HMRC’s own guidance, or an accountant, before you rely on it or file.
About the data
The same thing is true of all of them, so it is worth saying once in full.
Nothing is uploaded
The web apps read and write files in a folder you choose, using your browser. Your notes, spreadsheets, timetables, holdings, statements and tax records stay in that folder, and none of them is stored on the server — the only things that ever leave your computer are the three in the next tile. The server only sends you the app itself.
There is no account
Nothing to sign up for, no profile, no analytics, no tracking. I have no way of knowing who uses any of this or what is in your files, which is how I would want it as a user.
The three exceptions
Book’d Off can back up to your Google Drive if you switch it on — the same on Android and iPhone. Invested passes Trading 212 API calls through a relay, because a browser can’t call that API directly — it forwards and returns, and you can run it yourself instead. QuidVault can read scanned statements, receipts and payslips with Mistral’s OCR, and ask Mistral to suggest categories, sent straight from your browser with your own API key — switch it on, or do those by hand.
Contact
If something is broken, or there is something you need one of these to do, send me an email. I read them.