Artifact
Five Companies Run on Plain Text Files: Entity OS
Every corporate book has the same ingredients. I could not afford to have mine cleaned up, so I worked out how to keep them myself.
A thing I built. This page says what it is and what is true about it. Dan Stephens writes about psychology, AI systems and the method behind both at danieltstephens.com.
I am not an attorney, so this is not legal advice. This is my understanding as an operator.
Every corporate book has the same ingredients. Where the company is going. Where it is now. A log of what it has done. Its accounting ledgers. Its legal documents, the operating agreement and the articles of formation and the rest. A bakery and a nonprofit differ in almost everything except what has to be kept about them.
Mine were not well organized. Having that put right costs hundreds to thousands of dollars for each entity if you pay someone, and I did not have it. A pierced veil could cost everything. The veils need to be protected, so I have to do it.
What it is made of
- A drawer of original documents that is never edited: bank exports, signed agreements, filed paperwork, prior tax returns.
- A short notebook per company, written in plain language, one page per subject, with the pages linked to each other.
- Cash-basis books in plain text, with a checker that refuses to run if the arithmetic does not balance.
- The corporate records that keep the liability protection real: filings, resolutions, minutes, capital contributions and distributions kept visibly separate from personal money.
- The same shape for every company, so nothing has to be relearned when I move between them.
Where it stands
Five companies are on it and their books check clean.
It is probably not perfect, but nothing ever is. It is the best I can do with AI assistance.
By the numbers
- 5 companies on a validated, cash-basis text ledger; the checker exits clean on all 5
- At least one checking account and one credit card carried in each company’s books
- The list of categories was copied once from a 2024 QuickBooks export. Nothing here has needed QuickBooks since.
- Hundreds to thousands of dollars for each entity: what having this done for me would have cost
- 1 fully invented worked example in the draft specification, never posted publicly
The morning page that reads across all of these companies at once is in One Morning Page for Every Company I Run.