Earlier quoted context omitted.
No need to OCR, just use Gemini Flash 2.0. It's great at this.
How is it not OCR?
Yes I’m curious too.
Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
71–80 of 91 posts
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#72Built my own expense tracker on top of Teable. I’m partly lucky because I live in Taiwan and almost any receipt here comes with itemised breakdown as a QR code, so I can scan that from my phone and pipe it off to a queue for ingestion Didn’t want to use LLMs, but wanted automated categorisation of transactions, did that with some vector embeddings and Semantic Router ( https://github.com/aurelio-labs/semantic-router…
Interesting.
Any code you want to share?
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn’t importing a credit card statement eliminate the need for manual entries? I don’t use an expense tracking tool - apologies if my question may is missing context.
Most banks don't have an API, and statements are (often) lagged, sometimes even by a week or a month depending on how archaic the systems are.
The Canadian government has apparently introduced a framework for sharing your banking data securely with third parties (budgeting apps, financial products) in an effort to eliminate this shady screen scraping and credential sharing that a lot of these kind of apps do. Hoping they actually follow through...
https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't find the library right this second but there's a JavaScript library that takes human date descriptions, like "last Friday" and creates a date object. Depending on users' typing speed that might be another convenience factor thing.
These sound great in theory but as an app user I have found their implementation can range from deeply irritating to downright broken. Anti-use cases off the top of my head might be (this was from a calendar/reminder app): - I write myself an appointment on Monday to remind myself to plan a meal for next Friday, so the app silently moves the Monday app to Friday without telling me just because the words "next Friday"…
Ooh those are good test cases for the calendar event creator with natural language parsing app I'm building :)
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#75Thanks for building and sharing this!
A few years ago I did a deep dive on expense-tracking apps/services - ostensibly to write a big comparison blog post about them all - but that never happened - but really because I wanted something just like this but without all the bells and whistles that most apps have.
The two biggest gripes I remember having when I did that deep dive:
1) It sounds so simple, but most apps/services which promised "import your statements and we'll take care of the rest" simplicity fell down over the simplest issue: If I have my monthly rent auto-drafted, and some months it shows up on the 31st and other months on the 1st, for example, the apps absolutely could not handle that (and I'd have a month with double-rent showing in my breakdown).
2) I just had no interest in budgeting functionality built in. Lots of people do. I didn't - I just wanted to see a simple breakdown of expenses just like ExpenseOwl (hence my extra thank-yous). SO many apps assumed that budgeting functionality was a must-have that they over-complexified things and forced the user to enter budgets, etc.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#76I built my own similar tool for my wife and I, with the same goal of making entering transactions as fast as possible, and one thing I found useful was predictive form filling. Some categories have the same thing logged over and over (like for the "Gas" category I always made the title "Gas") so when you select the "Gas" category it prefills the title field with the most common transaction title for that category. Al…
Another approach might be to build an app that parses the SMS trails that card transactions generate to reduce the need for manually entering transactions.
This is exactly what I did for my DIY solution, it's quite amazing how far you can get with some SMS parsing.
Initially I was still missing quite a lot of transactions, as there isn't a SMS for non-CC payments, but then I realized I could just grab the information from the 2FA confirmation, as it had all the important details.
I'm not so good on the frontend, so I'm still using redash to build charts, dashboards and alerts, but it's fine for keeping an overview.
Long-term I would still like to switch to parsing the statement PDF from the bank, especially since there's an option to receive them automatically at the end of the month, but I'm dragging my feet on that one, as parsing tables from PDF is surprisingly difficult. Even though the actual text is embedded in the PDF, getting it in the correct layout has proven impossible so far. Or maybe I'm just missing some piece of the puzzle?
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#77i use paisa currently, this seems cool too
1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.hemanths.p...
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#78Thanks for building and sharing this! A few years ago I did a deep dive on expense-tracking apps/services - ostensibly to write a big comparison blog post about them all - but that never happened - but really because I wanted something just like this but without all the bells and whistles that most apps have. The two biggest gripes I remember having when I did that deep dive: 1) It sounds so simple, but most apps/ser…
appreciate it! thank you for showing support!
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#79I built my own similar tool for my wife and I, with the same goal of making entering transactions as fast as possible, and one thing I found useful was predictive form filling. Some categories have the same thing logged over and over (like for the "Gas" category I always made the title "Gas") so when you select the "Gas" category it prefills the title field with the most common transaction title for that category. Al…
Wouldn’t importing a credit card statement eliminate the need for manual entries? I don’t use an expense tracking tool - apologies if my question may is missing context.
Actual Finance (similar open source software) does this via SimpleFIN Bridge. It even supported connecting a credit card option that rocket money doesn't.
Re: Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
almost none such tools touch the problem of future planning or projection. it's kind of strange but perhaps it reflects culture. nothing beats making your own spreadsheets.
What kind of future projection are you looking for? My main issue is not all months are the same, sometimes I might spend way more in a given month for a given category (perhaps a one-off purchase like new furniture) that I don't aim to replicate for the next month, so how would the projection work in that case?
You create buffer categories that you slowly fill up over time and use for these one-offs. YNAB calls it "rolling with the punches". Most categories are predictable month to month, and the ones that aren't or are one offs you budget separately for.