Theres so many expense trackers out there and theres one single thing preventing them from just taking over and solving a huge part of personal finance

The data entry. Its not feasible to take up a parttime job as a data entry clerk, not even to have such great vsiibility over your finances. What we need is the data thats generated at the POS (including and itemized reciept) to flow fully through the system and be accesibke to you so you can log it in these apps and make financial decisions with it.

I know plaid does this at the transaction level, which is a grwat start even if we dont have itemized reciepts but i wonder why that hasnt taken over? Why doesnt everyone use an expense tracker integrated with plaid?

Until the data pipeline issue is solved, these crud apps with data viz on top will never be able to follow through on their potential value

^ this. its the only reason i bother to pay for a buget/money app. none of these OS ones have any real integration for automatic syncing. and honestly, even those like plaid and such all have tons of issues with various providers, so it's an imperfect system.

Seems like an easy thing to point an LLM at. Just throw it photos of physical receipts and route your email receipts and account statements it's way.

If it miscategorizes some things, it's not a big deal.

Your still doing data entry. You have to take photos of the reciepts and validate that it read them right. That doesnt scale.

And generally if youre resorting to taking a photo of a printed piece of paper you gotta have the ambition to try to get the info from the computer that printed it

Don't bother validating. Accept that it won't be perfect. Accept that you might miss a bunch of receipts.

It doesn't need to be anywhere near perfect. It'll be good enough in aggregate.

agree. building a tracker is easy but getting the data is the pain point... I am using plaid but it doesn't support all the banks, not to mention tracking expense not paid by cards.

MoneyPouch is a self hosted expense tracker that focuses on quick manual entry of transactions using keyboard shortcuts. It currently only supports USD currency and whatever banks SimpleFin supports for bank syncing. Try it out using the demo site and read more about it in the README and let me know what works, what doesn't. Any feedback is appreciated.

I used an excel sheet for the longest time and this was ugly and annoying to use because any sort of visualization or aggregate data involved needing to know how to work excel. This might have been a skill issue ... but anything is better than excel.

Looks good. Great job. Will add it to the moose store so anyone can install it with 1 click