Show HN: Lunch Money, a personal budgeting tool with multi-currency support

I wish there was more breakdown in "personal finance" apps. Years and years ago I was looking for budgeting apps and Quicken kept coming up. It looked like it mostly did checkbook balancing and keeping track of multiple accounts--not anything I needed.

Mint worked out well for awhile. I feel like it was a decent substitute for "writing every transaction in a notebook for a week" to help you find that gym membership you've been meaning to cancel or realize how your occasional lattes add up. It also helped with categories for previous months and "am I making more than I'm spending" which helped me get out of debt.

More recently I tried YNAB, which seems like it does those things well but also help with future month categories (basically a digital version of the envelope method) and help set aside money for specific goals. But after trying it a few times it never quite clicked and I never seemed to keep up with it.

These all seem to fill different needs but it's not obvious until you start putting data into them. I check out new apps all the time and they often fall into the same, few well developed category, but it takes up a lot of time to suss out (and it's a bit scary handing over credentials when you're evaluating)

I tested a lot of similar project in the past 2 years: Buxfer, GNUCash, YNAB 4 & 5, Mint, and Banktivity (currently using) and I'm willing to pay as high as $70 per year for a product that fulfills my needs.

I liked your project, the interface is clean, responsive and fast. If I may, I would like to give you my list of the most useful features :

- Self-hosted: Although, I used online apps in the past, this is now an _absolute_ requirement. I'm never, ever, going back to linking my bank accounts to a SAS app. I would be, of-course, happy to pay a premium for this (and for the Kubernetes templates).

- Transaction imports: OFX, QIF, CSV, XLSX...

- Regex category matching: For automatically matching transactions to the correct category

- Subset selection on reports: Ignoring specific accounts, categories or tagged operations from specific reports reports

- Multi-currency: I tried apps where the only currency available was USD, they did not stick around

- Exports: transactions and reports

- Rewrites: Rewriting transaction labels automatically (following user-defined rules)

- Sanity checks: Travel expenses + Reimbursements must equal zero. If not, Amex messed up again and I should know about it

Hope this helps!

Another thought-provoking idea: try the method for a while and write a blog post about it.

TypeScript is a beautiful thing.

The next level things that powered me up are:

- relay + graphql : map queries/mutations and object types to typescript. I have a workflow at the moment where python + graphene typings "bubble up" to typescript types via schema.graphql

- React.FC + hooks : makes it that much easier to grok a component in a large codebase.

- prettier : automatic code formatting on save, configuration works project-wide so all team members commit organized code

- DefinitelyTyped being reliable when it comes to releasing packages has helped a lot

I don't even use the autocompletion / go to definition that editors also usually bundle, but it's there, especially with VSCode. When the pieces don't fit, tslint catches it initially, if not that tsc.

Also, despite only using TS less than a year, the typing errors have been getting more friendly in the past few TS releases.

I'm keen to have a look. I've been frustrated with other tools because they're too focused on splitting everything into identical monthly budgets when that's really not how finances work IRL:

1) My driver's license costs $150 to renew once every 5 years - I don't want to split that into 60 monthly allocations of $2.50 and end up having over $100 sitting in my account for an expense that's still not due for over a year. I just want a tool that knows what expenses are coming up over the next 3/6/12 months and let me know if it thinks I'm going to overdraw my account. $150 is actually really easy to scrape together when you have 6 months notice that you're going to be short.

2) I spend $100 on public transport every 2nd Thursday because I get paid every 2nd Thursday. That means either $200/month or $300/month depending how many Thursdays fall inside the calendar month, and whether they're actually the Thursdays that I get paid on. Having a monthly budget that allocates $217/month on public transport (because that's the monthly average) makes me set aside $17 most months unnecessarily, or possibly leave me short $83 and unable to get to work if I spend the remainder.