Years before anyone was calling it “personal data infrastructure,” I was building exactly that. Starting with Intuit Mint, I set up automated transaction imports across every financial account — income, expenses, investments — so that categorized, real-time financial reporting was always available without manual entry. When Mint was sunset in 2024, the system migrated through Monarch, QuickBooks, Fivetran, and Postgres. Nobody paid for this. There’s no client. It’s just what happens when a systems thinker decides they want to actually understand their own financial picture instead of approximating it once a year at tax time. The architecture has since expanded into a multi-entity accounting consolidation system that would be at home in a small finance department.
QuickBooks was a waypoint in that migration, not the destination — real-time reporting needed a real data pipeline and a real warehouse underneath it, which is the same conversation I have with clients still running everything through QuickBooks alone.