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Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

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Re: Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

#51

Post by mackrevinack »

jmathai wrote: post #26

Congrats on the launch. I don’t know how folks manage to consistently budget if they have to enter transactions manually. After trying a bunch of overly complex budgeting apps like ynab - I wrote one for my wife and I (it used to be open for others). https://fiers.co/features/spend I’m using a developer plaid account (free) to download transactions. Works pretty well - we are goin on 4 years of budgeting and it’s bee…

does ynab still make you enter things manually? i think i remember reading some ynab blog posts years ago where they were implying that they kept it manual by design so that you would be taking a more active role in your budgeting every day, compared to something that added everything automatically. it makes sense but it could have also just been an excuse at the time because its complicated to add support for that type of thing

Re: Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

#52

Post by Nyoxide »

rathish_g wrote: post #50

Congratulations on the launch. Manual entry is very tricky. I use an app from Microsoft called SMS Organizer. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/sms-organize... It scans my SMS and nicely categorizes all my transactions. Axios (previously Walnut) also does the job well, but it's very cluttered after the latest update. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.daamitt.wa... Not sure if these apps…

Thanks for sharing, will take a look !

Re: Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

#53

Post by Nyoxide »

st0le wrote: post #44
Nyoxide wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're totally right, I can't imagine giving access to my bank accounts either. That's why I chose to manually enter the expenses. Yes, you have to think about it every time, but I bet on the fact that it takes only a few seconds to add an expense in my app. Unfortunately, I'm not able to find a better solution yet but maybe one day we'll find one !

I had this idea to basically have the Budgeting app look at the notifications on my phone or emails from the bank to parse the transactions details automatically. On iOS if an app exposes a Shortcut, I could setup a Shortcut Automation to automatically add an expense when a new email from my bank shows up. Would need some REGEX or LLM ;)

Great idea ! Would need some investigation but should be doable

Re: Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

#54

Post by mackrevinack »

st0le wrote: post #44
Nyoxide wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're totally right, I can't imagine giving access to my bank accounts either. That's why I chose to manually enter the expenses. Yes, you have to think about it every time, but I bet on the fact that it takes only a few seconds to add an expense in my app. Unfortunately, I'm not able to find a better solution yet but maybe one day we'll find one !

I had this idea to basically have the Budgeting app look at the notifications on my phone or emails from the bank to parse the transactions details automatically. On iOS if an app exposes a Shortcut, I could setup a Shortcut Automation to automatically add an expense when a new email from my bank shows up. Would need some REGEX or LLM ;)

you can do this with tasker on android. read whatever text is in the notification and then use the http command to send on the information if theres an API, or even use the autoinput plugin to open the app and tap on certain elements, but thats kind of messy

Re: Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

#56

Post by rentpeek »

toyg wrote: post #8

Well, good luck to you but you're competing in a very crowded field. Disconnected expense-tracking apps are just one step under Todo apps, in terms of number of alternatives... And most users just don't stick with them, because manually tracking every transaction is exhausting. When you'll start thinking about adding automated bank fees, which is the necessary progression of the concept, then you'll discover why ther…

This is a super important point. I'm a super analytical person and have spreadsheets for most important things in my life. So a real outlier in terms of recording data. And STILL i find it hard to keep up with my manual budgeting app that I have.

Integration is super important and imo, the real opportunity is improving the auto-tagging and sorting functionality. Mint for example is pretty terrible at handling things like venmo or one-off transactions

Re: Show HN: I made a super simple iOS app to track expenses

#60

Post by earthling8118 »

mackrevinack wrote: post #51
jmathai wrote: post #26

Congrats on the launch. I don’t know how folks manage to consistently budget if they have to enter transactions manually. After trying a bunch of overly complex budgeting apps like ynab - I wrote one for my wife and I (it used to be open for others). https://fiers.co/features/spend I’m using a developer plaid account (free) to download transactions. Works pretty well - we are goin on 4 years of budgeting and it’s bee…

does ynab still make you enter things manually? i think i remember reading some ynab blog posts years ago where they were implying that they kept it manual by design so that you would be taking a more active role in your budgeting every day, compared to something that added everything automatically. it makes sense but it could have also just been an excuse at the time because its complicated to add support for that t…

They have automatic input now for sure, but I believe it is only through plaid. I couldn't find a list but there are banks that can talk with plaid without requiring you give them your password and it works well enough.

Without automatic input it would be much less worth it. Sure, mindfulness and all. But that's a lot of effort to do. When you use the automatic one it can even sort the categories in most cases by matching the last category used for that store

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