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What holds up a half-year closing? Not the bookkeeping.

It is the receipts that are still missing. Credit-card receipts, subscription invoices, expenses — each in a different portal, behind a different password. Your fiduciary is not waiting for numbers, they are waiting for paper. And collecting it costs you half a day you do not have.

This Monday that list was ours. An agent worked through it in a single run: logged in to three portals — without ever seeing a password, those stay in the vault. Searched our own mail archive for invoices, gathered 34 receipts, named them all the same way (date, vendor, amount), filed them the way the fiduciary wants them. And reported which ten items are still missing — instead of someone noticing in October.

34 receipts, 90 minutes, zero passwords seen. The only human touch: reviewing the reply mail and saying GO. Your Saturday belongs to you again.

What is on your closing to-do list? Send us two lines — we will tell you what you could hand off.

The five pages, for browsing:

Who guards your passwords from your AI?

You sign in ten times a day. Password, Face ID, fingerprint — nothing runs without it. Naturally.

And then you let an AI agent work for you. It needs the same accounts: mail, bookkeeping, customer data. Most people simply hand it the passwords.

At our place the agent never sees one. It asks, a human approves, a vault fills in. The agent gets the result, not the key. And the vault sits on our own servers, in Switzerland.

That is not security decoration. It is the precondition for letting an agent touch real systems at all. How it works: AI without your keys.

Why do you have to make three phone calls to learn a price? You don’t.

The usual routine: fill in a form. Two days later somebody calls and asks questions. Then a meeting. Then the quote. You wanted a number, you got a sales process.

We asked ourselves why we should do it that way — and found no good answer. So the price is on the website. Eight questions, 60 seconds, an honest range, right on your screen. No callback, no sales pitch.

A price you only learn after two meetings is not a price. It is a negotiating position. Try it: web analytics calculator.

How fast can you find a contract from 2019? Honestly.

First the folder on the shared drive. Then the mail attachments. Then you ask a colleague whether she remembers where it was filed. Twenty minutes later you have a file — and you are not sure it is the latest version.

Those twenty minutes cost nothing, says the bookkeeping. They only cost every day, for everyone, and nobody bills them.

At our place you type the question into the company chat and get the answer with its source. One minute. Paper too: putting it on the scanner glass is enough — a minute later it can be queried.

Start with a single folder, not the whole archive. The rest follows by itself the first time somebody finds something. How we approach old files: legacy cleanup.

Who really visits your website? Your tool doesn’t know.

500 visitors this month, says the dashboard. Sounds good. Except: part of them are bots nobody filters out. Another part clicked the cookie banner away and never shows up at all. And the data sits with an ad corporation in the US.

What remains is a number you cannot base any decision on. It still appears in every monthly report.

There is another way: count anonymously, evaluate honestly, hosted in Switzerland. Without a banner, because there is nothing to consent to. That is exactly how we measure our own website — Sunday’s two-month review was built on it.

How many of your marketing numbers would you sign off on if you knew how they were made? Calculator and package: web analytics.

How many hours does a single blog post cost you? With image, audio and distribution to every channel.

Writing is the least of it. Then comes the image. Then the audio version. Then the same thing four times into four channels, each cut differently. Half a day — and the text was finished after an hour.

For us it is one job. The post, its image, the audio version, the announcements in the channels: the same machine, one run. This very entry was scheduled by it — weeks ahead, on a single planning day.

We sell nothing that does not run in our own daily business. What that looks like for your marketing: channels you own.

What costs the most in a dispute? Not the lawyer. The sorting.

One binder. 2,400 pages. Four years of history. Contracts, amendments, invoices, mail threads, a few phone photos. Before anyone argues the merits, someone has to read all of it and put it in order. That work is billed by the hour — and it is the dullest part of the whole case.

Here is what the binder looks like after a machine has read every page:

• 12 contracts and amendments, 3 of them unsigned
• 87 invoices and payment records, 4 of them booked twice
• 1,930 emails in the thread, 61 of them relevant
• 220 scanned pages, some handwritten, all read

It gets interesting where documents turn into a sequence. Day 0, the other side confirms delivery in writing. Day 14, they qualify it in an email — but never withdraw it. Day 31, they pay a first instalment, without reservation. Day 96, they send a reminder based on an amendment only one party signed. Day 214, the claim arrives, resting on exactly the promise from day 0.

What you end up with is not a binder but an index. Numbered, citable, every line with its source. No. 9 is the one-sided amendment. No. 12 is the payment record that contradicts it. Your lawyer starts where they would otherwise be after two weeks.

The case above is invented. Names, dates and amounts match no real file — the method does. And the part that matters most: the file never leaves the house. No contracts, no client data, no payroll goes to a provider abroad.

The same thing works outside the law: checking a set of books, matching receipts to payments, working out who promised what and when.

Do you have a binder like that? Tell us what is in it — we will tell you what can be made of it.

Flip through — the five pages from the case:

How many software subscriptions does your company pay for? More than it uses.

Per seat. Per month. Per module. Plus the tool only one person really needs, and the other one that has quietly kept running since the project ended in 2023.

The bill grows silently, because cleaning up is nobody’s job. And because every single line item is too small to catch anyone’s eye.

We build companies their tools ourselves. Once, tailored, no subscription per click. On their own servers, in Switzerland. That is not worth it for every tool — but for the three or four that carry the daily business, it almost always is.

The first step costs one hour: list all subscriptions, sorted by “is used” and “is paid”. The difference is your budget for the rebuild. How we approach it: legacy cleanup.

Tomorrow LinkedIn locks your account. Now what?

All gone. The followers you built over years were never yours — you rented them. You do not know their addresses.

A newsletter is yours. Your own website is yours. The rest is a shop window, and shop windows can be cancelled.

How we solved this for ourselves — hub and spokes, what we own and what we merely borrow — is in the post Channels you own. The test question for your company: if your most important channel changes the rules tomorrow — what is left for you?

Where does your company start with AI? Small.

Not with the strategy that takes half a year. Not with the tool that can do everything and that nobody opens any more after three months.

Take the one process that annoys you today. Inbox. Quotes. Filing. Four weeks, one measurable result — then the next one.

The reason is unromantic: a small process can be understood completely. A large project cannot. And what you do not understand you cannot automate — you can only buy it.

That is how a company becomes AI-native: step by step, not in one go. Which process annoys you most this week? That one is yours.

The credit card statement arrives, and the receipts for it are everywhere: in the inbox between newsletters, as a scan, somewhere in the filing. In every company someone then spends an hour searching.

At our place a graphics card in the office does it. It reads amount, date and sender from the mail and files the receipt where it belongs — 1.3 seconds per receipt. No receipt leaves the building.

That is not a promise but a measurement — on our own bookkeeping, every answer checked by hand: reading out fields 97 % exact, sorting 100 real mails 92 % right, transcribing paper receipts 92.9 %. In 4 out of 5 disciplines the graphics card beat Claude Fable 5, the top cloud model. All numbers and all caveats are in yesterday’s LAB report.

Want this for your company? I am happy to walk you to this result.

The most-discussed piece on our channels by far was not a product announcement but a design decision: this website has no cookie banner. Yesterday the full post went live — how it works technically and legally, and what you deliberately give up.

The most frequent question since, publicly and privately: “Would that work for us?” The answer, in most cases: yes. The banner is only mandatory where visitors are tracked — if you count anonymously instead, there is nothing to ask. Everything better content and measurable marketing require, cookie-free measurement delivers in full.

So it is now a service: web analytics without a cookie banner — self-hosted analytics (Umami) on Swiss hosting or your own infrastructure, migration from Google Analytics included, and at the end the consent dialog disappears. Fixed price, set up exactly the way we run it ourselves — this website is the reference.

Our dashboard reported visitors from the US — at two in the morning. On closer inspection: Chrome on «Windows 7», zero seconds of dwell time, and every hit coming from the same Azure datacenter in Virginia.

So for one week we audited every single session. The result: 107 «visits» by raw count — 29 humans. Two thirds of our traffic were crawlers that execute JavaScript and therefore pass every common bot filter. In the AI era that is the normal case: machines reading for machines, dutifully counted as an audience by the statistics.

Our consequence: we count engagement-based now. A session only counts as human after ten seconds of dwell time or a real interaction — and the weekly report lists bots and humans separately, on purpose. Smaller numbers, but true ones.

This audit was only possible because we run our measurement ourselves — cookieless, banner-free, every session inspectable. With a black-box statistics product we could never have cross-examined those nocturnal Windows 7 visitors. Why that is also the more relaxed path legally is this week’s story on the blog.

Next to the monitoring dot in our taskbar sits a number: today’s working hours, counted live. Nobody started a stopwatch for it — and nobody will have to reconstruct a timesheet on Friday.

The principle behind it is beautifully simple: work always happens in the directory of the project at hand — so every working session knows by itself where it belongs. A small service mines the work logs hourly and keeps the books: hours per project, rate, and — because an AI agent works alongside us — its costs too, attributed token-exact to the right project. No timer, no back-filling, no month-end guessing.

A dashboard delivers the weekly picture: which mandate got how many hours, what the AI cost along the way, what is billable. The honest answer to «what does an AI hour really cost?» is in there at any moment — not as gut feeling, but as a ledger entry.

For clients this means billing transparency that does not rely on memory. What it looks like day to day is shown at the station «The computer keeps watch» on our new page How we work — the hour count is already visible in the taskbar image there.

For fifteen years the standard doorman for Linux servers was fail2ban: it reads your own logs, counts failed attempts and bans whoever rattles the door too often. Solid — but it only knows the attackers who knock on your door.

This month we replaced it across our fleet with CrowdSec. The principle is the same, with one decisive addition: detected attacks are shared with a worldwide community — as plain IP reports, never logs or content — and in return the server pulls the blocklist built from everyone’s reports. Anyone who misbehaved somewhere in the world is turned away here before their first attempt even lands. Neighbourhood watch instead of lone fighter.

The migration was uneventful — except for two snags worth passing on: the local API wanted the same port as a Docker service (fix: move the port, then install the firewall bouncer). And current Debian no longer writes a classic auth.log — the setup wizard detects this and correctly reads the system journal instead.

Why no antivirus, no heavyweight intrusion-detection system, and what a one-person fleet actually needs — the bigger security story is coming as a blog post of its own.

Since this week the notebook’s taskbar shows a small dot: green means everything on our server is fine. Red means something is broken — and a computer voice additionally announces it out loud, so it doesn’t starve in the corner of the eye.

The check service looks after the services, the disks and the nightly backup every two minutes. Ninety seconds after going live, the first alert came in — and it was real: last night’s backup had failed. Silently and unnoticed — the backup itself was there, but the cleanup step was stuck on an orphaned lock from the previous evening.

Without the dot we would only have noticed when we actually needed the backup. Which is to say, at the worst possible moment. As it was, it took five minutes to repair and harden against repeats.

Self-hosted means self-responsible — but not alone: the machine keeps watch with us. How the whole chain works, from the check script through the VPN to the speech output, we’ll tell in more detail on the blog soon.

It has existed since early July, and we never announced it: our newsletter. Time to catch up.

Subscribers get new blog posts and the Sunday edition as e-mail — nothing more. No “offers”, no third party reading along: the list runs on our own server (Listmonk, open source), the mails leave our own house, and the subscription ends with one click on the unsubscribe link. Double opt-in, it goes without saying — nobody lands on the list unasked.

The signup field sits below every blog post.

And because a newsletter should do more than redeliver what already exists, we are working on a small head start: subscribers will soon read new posts three days before everyone else. As a thank-you — not as a paywall.

Since this week, every note here carries its own dot-matrix image. What emerged almost in passing: a small series of works. Deterministically generated from a seed — same seed, same pixels, provably reproducible — and each work declared an edition of 1/1.

At “digital artworks, edition, authenticity” many people immediately think of NFTs. We asked ourselves the question seriously — and decided against. Because what an NFT technically proves is exactly three things: who issued a work, when, and who owns it. All three work without a blockchain:

Who: Every work has a provenance statement (title, edition, seed, SHA-256 checksum), signed with an Ed25519 key. The public key sits on this website — verification is a one-liner with standard tooling (ssh-keygen -Y verify).

When: The checksums live in our Git history, in web archives — and from now on in every entry of our RSS feed. Thousands of feed readers and archives thereby become independent witnesses to the timestamp. It is the old notarial principle of “notice in the newspaper”, just machine-readable.

Whose: Ownership changes hands via a signed transfer statement — the way the art market has traded photography and video art for decades: certificate of authenticity instead of token. Scarcity is guaranteed not by mathematics but by reputation. For a brand built on traceability, that is no disadvantage.

The complete catalogue — every work with seed, checksum and signature — is now available at analytikdata.ch/works.

And should tokenization ever become worthwhile: the signed statements are exactly the metadata a mint would need. We lose nothing by deciding later.

A short announcement in our own cause: these notes — and the blog posts — now reach you outside the big platforms as well.

Bluesky: @analytikdata.ch — our domain is the username there. The identity lives in the protocol, not in a purchased checkmark.

Fediverse/Mastodon: @aktuell@social.anadat.ch — not an account on someone else’s platform, but an instance of our own: a node of the network that we run ourselves.

RSS: /en/news/rss.xml for these notes, /rss.xml for the blog — for everyone who never gave up on feeds. Rightly so.

There is nothing exclusive there and no conversion sermon. It is the same content, distributed by a small service on our own server — nobody types it out twice, and no algorithm reorders it.

Why we bet on channels that belong to us — and what that means in practice for a small company — will become its own blog post at the end of August.

The screensaver on this machine now shows our own brand mark: the dot-matrix A that tips over into a D column by column and back again, accompanied by a scan line — the same animation as the logo on our website, just in the terminal instead of the browser.

In between, the pictograms of our blog posts appear, each in its accent color:

The nicest detail: the screensaver doesn’t know these marks at all. On startup it reads them from the same system that generates our blog covers. When a new post appears, its mark runs across the screen from the next idle moment on — without anyone maintaining anything.

Effort: a good 250 lines of Python, built in one afternoon together with the AI agent. The video above isn’t filmed off a screen either — it is rendered from the same scene logic as the screensaver itself, so the two cannot drift apart.

Why the effort for an idle-screen image? Because the workplace is the most seen surface of a small company — in the café, in a meeting, on every screenshot. How far you can push this principle when the entire visual identity exists as code — more on that soon on the blog.

Perhaps you noticed — more likely you didn’t, and that is exactly the point: this website has no cookie banner.

Not an oversight and not a legal loophole, but a design decision. The banner is only mandatory where consent is required — and consent is only required where visitors are tracked. We track nobody: no advertising cookies, no fingerprinting, no third-party scripts.

What we still know: which pages get read, where visitors come from, which campaign works. That is measured by a self-hosted, cookie-less analytics solution — counted anonymously instead of tracked personally. For better content, that is entirely enough.

The pleasant side effect: the first impression of this website is its content, not a consent dialog.

How exactly this works technically and legally — and what you deliberately give up along the way — will appear soon as a full post on the blog.

By the way, we set up this same stack for clients: web analytics without a cookie banner.

Our ticker — the automatic trail of our own posts, security patches and press picks — got a page of its own: with day separators, filters (“patches only” works straight from a link) and a marker for what is new since your last visit.

And because news belongs wherever you want it, the feed now comes in every form: as RSS for the feed reader, as a newsletter in four flavors (per post, per note, daily, weekly — signup at the bottom of every page), via Fediverse and Bluesky — and as an app: open analytikdata.ch/ticker on your phone and you can install it on the home screen. Its own icon, its own window, works briefly offline too.

The part that surprised even us: the app was the smallest item of the evening. No app store, no approval procedure, no cut for a platform — the open web has shipped the entire app infrastructure for a long time; most companies just never use it. One manifest, one small script for the offline moment, done. The longer story follows on the blog.

Our visitor numbers are, frankly, still small. And that is exactly when something starts to matter: whoever builds their own website all day is its most loyal visitor. Every deploy check, every glance at a new post — all of it lands in the statistics and distorts them.

So: exclude ourselves. With classic analytics services there would be an opt-out cookie for that. Except — we deliberately track cookie-less (Umami, self-hosted, no personal profiles). No cookie banner for you, but also: no cookie to write an opt-out into.

The solution is almost disappointingly simple. The Umami tracker respects a flag in the browser’s localStorage:

localStorage.setItem('umami.disabled', 1);

For that there is now a small page, linked from nowhere: visit it once per device, done — the browser no longer counts. A button undoes it. And since the whole thing can only disable tracking, it is no secret either: analytikdata.ch/opt-out is open to anyone who would rather not be counted while reading. Fits the attitude.

Why we measure at all — and everything you can measure without surveillance (and what we deliberately don’t) — more on that soon on the blog.

While planning our AI cockpit, the uncomfortable question came up: what happens if the model behind it is discontinued — or if in a year we would rather have a different one? Maybe a Chinese one, maybe ChatGPT.

Our answer has two parts.

Part 1: The knowledge belongs to us, not to the vendor. Everything our agents need to know — decisions, runbooks, inventories, even the agent’s long-term memory — lives as Markdown in Git. No proprietary format, no vendor cloud. If today’s agent goes away, tomorrow’s reads the same files and carries on. Structure beats intelligence — at parting, too.

Part 2: The vendor becomes a config line. Anthropic’s API format has become a de facto standard: several providers (GLM, Kimi, DeepSeek) offer compatible endpoints, and translators like LiteLLM cover the rest (ChatGPT, Gemini). Our tools will therefore no longer point at the vendor but at a gateway of our own:

# Which model answers is decided by our config — not by the vendor
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://our-own-gateway

Honestly: there is never zero lock-in — the agent tools themselves come from one vendor, and every switch costs habituation. But it is the difference between moving house and expropriation. Own your stack also means: own your exit.

On this machine, almost every work session starts the same way: open a terminal, start the AI agent. If the first command of the day is always the same, it should cost exactly one keystroke.

That is why every new terminal now greets you with a small menu:

Type a digit, hit Enter, go. Technically this is unspectacular — and that is exactly the point. It is Bash aliases (yes, 1 is a valid alias name) plus a small function that shows the menu only in fresh terminals, not in nested shells (abridged here):

alias 1='claude --dangerously-skip-permissions'
alias 2='claude --continue --dangerously-skip-permissions'
alias 3='claude --resume --dangerously-skip-permissions'

quick_menu() {
  echo "Quick launch  (type ? to show again)"
  echo "  1  claude (skip permissions)"
  echo "  2  claude --continue (resume last session)"
  echo "  3  claude --resume (pick a session)"
}
alias ?='quick_menu'

[[ $SHLVL -le 1 ]] && quick_menu

About twenty lines of Bash. The agent wrote them itself, tested them (including the question of what shell nesting depth a fresh terminal under Hyprland actually has) and documented them in the inventory — effort: a few minutes of shouting instructions into the chat.

An honest note belongs here: key 1 starts the agent in autonomous mode, that is, without asking back on individual actions. On a machine of your own, encrypted, where everything important lives in Git, that is a deliberate trade of control for speed. You should make it deliberately — which is why it is stated here.

Hand-sized jobs like this come up daily for us. Individually they are too small for a blog post — hence this new section: short notes from the ongoing rebuild, unfiltered and in real time. The long stories will keep appearing on the blog.