Deploy and Host Recat QBO on Railway

Recat QBO is a self-hosted transaction categorization and review queue for QuickBooks Online — an open-source alternative to Uncat. Give your team a simple queue for categorizing uncategorized QuickBooks transactions without giving everyone a QuickBooks login.

About Hosting Recat QBO

One click provisions the Recat QBO application and a PostgreSQL database with generated session and encryption secrets — no required input. The setup wizard then asks how you want to start: try the demo (a built-in fake QuickBooks with two sample companies — the entire loop works: sync, categorize, split, transfer, post, undo, reports) or connect your real QuickBooks with your own free Intuit API credentials. Your choice is honored end to end, demo and real companies can coexist, and no environment variables are involved. Database migrations run automatically on every deploy.

Common Use Cases

• Let a bookkeeping team categorize bank-feed transactions without QuickBooks seats
• Accountants managing multiple client companies from one queue
• Owners who want drill-down P&L/Balance Sheet views without opening QuickBooks
• Replacing per-client SaaS categorization subscriptions with self-hosted software you own

Dependencies for Recat QBO Hosting

• PostgreSQL (included in this template)
• Free QuickBooks API credentials from the Intuit Developer Portal (only when connecting real books; demo mode needs nothing)
• Any SMTP provider for magic-link sign-in email (configurable in the setup wizard; the first admin can sign in via a link printed to the deploy logs)

Deployment Dependencies

• Source, docs, and the Intuit setup walkthrough: https://github.com/tx-joshg/recat-qbo
• Image: ghcr.io/tx-joshg/recat-qbo
• License: AGPL-3.0

Implementation Details

Generated variables wire everything together automatically:

• DATABASE_URL → the template's PostgreSQL service
• SESSION_SECRET, ENCRYPTION_KEY → cryptographically generated per deploy
• APP_URL → your Railway public domain (drives OAuth redirect URI and sign-in links)

Every write to QuickBooks is dry-run by default until you disable it, and is recorded in an append-only audit log. OAuth tokens are AES-256-GCM encrypted at rest with the generated ENCRYPTION_KEY.

Why Deploy Recat QBO on Railway?

Railway is a singular platform to deploy your infrastructure stack. Railway will host your infrastructure so you don't have to deal with configuration, while allowing you to vertically and horizontally scale it.

By deploying Recat QBO on Railway, you are one step closer to supporting a complete full-stack application with minimal burden. Host your servers, databases, AI agents, and more on Railway.