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Comment by ftio | Hacker News Reader

This looks great, but expense tracker apps are challenging for me to adopt. Either they ask to connect to my bank, or they ask me to manually enter my expenses.

Neither of these is at all appealing to me.

First, I have no idea who the developers are or what their incentives are. I do not hand over access to my bank accounts lightly. No bank connections. I also don't have the patience to track every single purchase manually. It's really disruptive.

If you can solve both of those, I'd consider adopting. Till then, good luck!

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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

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

>Either they ask to connect to my bank, or they ask me to manually enter my expenses.

What other options are there?

I think scanning receipts (which still requires manual effort) or parsing bank SMSes locally could work

If I had a great idea, I'd build it. I do think if you could reduce the friction of adding a transaction to very, very low (maybe adding a transaction through a combination of voice and location-awareness?), I'd consider giving it a shot.

It's a tall wall to climb, and there isn't an obvious ladder lying around.

Thank you very much for sharing your ideas !

The alternative that I use is to use GnuCash and periodically download CSVs from my bank of my transactions. That way I don't have to manually enter transactions and don't have to give my bank login to some random third party.

All that's needed is about 15-30 minutes every couple of months to bring in the latest transactions and double check the categorizations. GnuCash uses double entry bookkeeping, so you always know if your data is accurate or not by being able to reconcile the accounts.

You can record a macro to go download transactions from your bank.

I'd use an website/app that supports my preferred data ingestion process -- periodically manually downloading my bank & credit transactions (supporting at least one of: csv, qif, and qfx), and allows me to define at least (account, category, description) tuples mapping transaction to buckets (ideally hierarchical).

(Ideally also a focus on viewing trends at various grains and easy drill down, as opposed to "don't buy any more smoothies for the next 11 days, but go ahead and rent more movies soon -- use it or lose it!".)

I see gnucash mentioned as an option for ingesting downloaded transactions. Any others?

lunchmoney, recommended in another comment, ticks a lot of boxes for me and supports uploading downloaded transactions.

I believe the various plain text accounting tools (ledger, hledger, beancount) have tools that allow for this. I haven't used them as I use gnucash but they may be worth a look.

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