Built by the Principal Architect of a Philippine universal bank.

In banking, the assumption is that a small business has an accountant, an ERP, and a finance team. In reality, most of the Philippines doesn't. A sari-sari owner runs the books in a notebook. A Shopee seller copies orders into Excel. A food cart owner writes expenses on the back of receipts.

The big bookkeeping apps — QuickBooks, Xero, Wave — were built for accountants in the US, UK, and Australia. They don't speak BIR. They don't reconcile Shopee payouts. They cost more than what a sari-sari owner earns in a week. And they expect you to know what a journal entry is before you can record your first sale.

Talkbooks is the answer to a question I kept asking myself: what would proper bookkeeping look like if it was designed for the actual person running the business — not for their accountant, not for an enterprise, not for someone who already knows accounting?

The answer turned out to be: you'd talk to it. In Tagalog, English, or Taglish. From your phone, while you're packing an order or walking between customers. And it would handle the books, the inventory, the channel payouts, and your BIR forms behind the scenes.

I'm John Moses Ventura. My day job is at one of the Philippines' universal banks. Most of the fifteen years before that were spent inside other regulated financial institutions — a BSP-licensed crypto exchange, an OCC-chartered US digital bank, an MAS-jurisdiction Singapore exchange. Each came with regulators looking over my shoulder, audit trails that couldn't lie, and the assumption that every centavo had to reconcile. That habit is the foundation Talkbooks sits on.

• →Senior Assistant Vice President · Principal Architect, Security Bank Corporation [BSP-supervised universal bank] (Nov 2023 – present, Makati) — banking-grade systems architecture at one of the country's universal banks.
• →Director of Information Technology, Axos Bank [OCC-chartered US digital bank · NYSE: AX] (2023) — IT leadership at one of the largest federally-chartered digital banks in the United States.
• →Head of Engineering, PDAX [BSP-licensed VASP · PH crypto exchange] (2021 – 2023) — built and led the engineering team behind PDAX (Philippine Digital Asset Exchange), the country's BSP-licensed virtual asset service provider. Day-to-day reality: regulated reporting, real-money ledger correctness, BSP audits.
• →Chief Technology Officer, Skipjack Corp [Singapore-jurisdiction crypto exchange] (operating XZT / USDT on STEX Exchange, Singapore, 2018 – 2021) — built and ran the exchange tech stack. Where the multi-currency, multi-fee, weekly-payout reconciliation problem first started looking solvable.
• →Senior Director of Engineering, CarParts.com [NASDAQ: PRTS] (2023) — engineering leadership at a US public e-commerce company.
• →Lead Blockchain Developer, DECENTERNET [Singapore] (2017 – 2018) — earlier blockchain and distributed-systems engineering work.
• →Senior Software Engineer, Arcadier [Makati marketplace SaaS] (2015 – 2017) — multi-tenant marketplace platform for small online sellers. The customer profile here overlaps almost completely with the Filipino sellers Talkbooks is built for today.

Two threads run through that arc and both shaped Talkbooks. The bank, exchange, and VASP work taught me that financial systems are paranoid for a reason — every transaction has to reconcile, every fee has to be accounted for, every form has to be filed correctly, every audit trail has to hold up. The marketplace-SaaS work taught me what real Filipino small sellers actually need: a tool that fits in their pocket, speaks their language, and doesn't require an accountant to operate.

Talkbooks takes the discipline a regulator would expect of a bank — reconciliation, audit trail, currency separation, prefilled tax forms — and delivers it through a chat box a sari-sari owner or Shopee seller can actually use. The principles travel; the price tag and the complexity don't need to.

When you hand over your books to an app, you're trusting the person behind it. Talkbooks isn't a venture-funded team behind a corporate brand; it's a single named builder with a public track record and a verifiable career. That's deliberate.

If something is broken, slow, or wrong, you can write to support@talkbooks.app and you'll hear back from me. If a regulator, accountant, or partner needs to verify the company behind Talkbooks, the information is on this page and on public sources.

In Filipino SMB culture, trust is relationship-based. So is this product.

Talkbooks launched in 2026 and is live on the App Store and Google Play. The Free tier is genuinely free and stays useful — bill reminders, the daily AI digest, and personal-finance tracking are all included so you can feel the value before paying. Personal ($2.99/mo) covers an active personal-finance user. Business ($9.99/mo) is the actual small-business plan with sales, inventory, orders, payout reconciliation, and BIR forms. Team ($24.99/mo) adds unlimited members for shops with staff.

We're working on Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop direct integrations next so the channel sync becomes automatic. CSV and accountant-export formats are on the 2026 H2 roadmap. None of the core promises change as we scale: still PH-first, still mobile-first, still chat-native, still one builder with his name on it.

Thank you for trusting your books to Talkbooks. — John