Who builds it
Built by one person, in Ceredigion
Alwen is not a venture-backed product looking for a market. It started because of a bill, it keeps a real company's books, and it is being built by the person who needed it. That has genuine advantages and at least one real drawback, and both are below.
It started as a bill I did not want to pay
Running more than one company means paying for bookkeeping software more than once, because almost every product in this market attaches its subscription to a set of books rather than to a person. Nothing about that is hidden or unfair. It is just a decision made early, by products built for the customer who has exactly one company, and it lands on you in full every month if you have three.
The obvious response is to accept it, because there is no alternative to switch to. Alwen exists because the second obvious response, eventually, was to build the alternative.
It keeps a real company's books, not a demonstration
My own company left QuickBooks in July 2026, and its books have been in Alwen ever since. Not a copy kept in step, not a pilot alongside the real thing - the actual ledger, the actual bank reconciliation, the actual year end.
That matters more than it sounds. The accounts sent to Companies House during testing are that company's real figures, not fabricated samples, and the things that have gone wrong have gone wrong on real money. A bank feed that quietly carried seven card authorisations worth £401.42 which the bank never settled was found by downloading a statement and comparing it line by line, because nothing inside the software could see it. That is not a class of bug you find on demo data.
- Real ledger, real bank reconciliation, real year end
- Companies House test filings made from real company accounts
- Every deadline in the product is one that applies to us too
Welsh is here because of where it is being built
Alwen is built in Ceredigion, and it is bilingual from the start rather than translated later. That ordering is the whole difference: a language added afterwards is a layer over a product that was designed in English, and it shows in the places nobody thinks to translate - the dates, the statutory terms, the email that goes out at two in the morning.
Company-secretarial terms come from the Companies House English-to-Welsh glossary rather than from a translator's judgement, and an automated check fails the release if the Welsh drifts from it or an English string is left untranslated. The work is not finished, and the page on Welsh in Alwen says plainly what is done and what is not.
What being small actually costs you
The advantages are real: no investor timetable deciding what gets built, no pricing set by a growth target, and the person who answers your email is the person who can fix the thing you are emailing about.
The drawback is equally real, and you should weigh it. One person builds more slowly than a company of forty. The product is narrower than the ones it sits beside - a VAT-registered company cannot yet keep its full books here, and that is a hard limit rather than a queue position. And a product built by one person carries a risk a large one does not, which is worth saying out loud rather than leaving you to work out.
The answer to that last part is not a promise. It is that your data is yours, exportable, and kept in a standard database rather than a format only we can read - so the cost of being wrong about us is your time, not your books.
- No investor timetable, and no pricing set by a growth target
- A narrower product than the ones it sits beside, today
- Your data exportable, in a standard format, at any point
The company
Alwen Limited is registered in England and Wales, company number 17458788, incorporated on 14 September 2026. Before that the work was done in my own name, which is the ordinary way a thing like this starts.
It is self-funded. There is no outside investment to service, which is why the pricing can be what it costs rather than what a funding round requires.
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Tell me what you need
If you run more than one company, or keep books in Welsh, or have looked at this and thought it would not work for you, I would genuinely like to know why.