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A comment on MoneyPouch – self hosted expense tracker.

Re:MoneyPouch – self hosted expense tracker by samrus on Saturday October 31, 2026 @10:44AM (#50316664)
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

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Re:MoneyPouch – self hosted expense tracker by roachman on Saturday October 31, 2026 @10:46AM (#50316676)
^ 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.
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Re:MoneyPouch – self hosted expense tracker by sjs382 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @01:47PM (#50318284)
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.

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Re:MoneyPouch – self hosted expense tracker by samrus on Sunday November 01, 2026 @05:03AM (#50324106)
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

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Re:MoneyPouch – self hosted expense tracker by sjs382 on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:50PM (#50328453)
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.

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Re:MoneyPouch – self hosted expense tracker by bill10 on Saturday October 31, 2026 @11:16PM (#50322415)
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.
[ Parent | on HN ]