Show HN: Monthly budgeting spreadsheet and ML expense categorisation | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Monthly budgeting spreadsheet and ML expense categorisation

expensesorted.com

12 pointsffstrauf7 comments

Hello,

I'd like to share the first version of an app I've built for myself to categorise my expenses.

Key features:

- *Google Sheets Integration:* The tool is based on the spreadsheet I've been using to track my expenses over the years. I've turned it into a template that is available on the website.

- *Automated Expense Categorization:* Tired of manually categorising and annoyed by the limits of rules, I've hooked the sheet up with an ML model that works based on past categorisations of your expenses. I've had great results with it.

The tool is simple and basic and lets you keep using your spreadsheet instead of moving stuff into proprietary apps.

It's a first version, but it's working for me so I thought I'd share it to see if anyone else might find it useful.

You can start by exploring the [demo](https://www.expensesorted.com/demo) and get the Google Sheet Template to dive right in.

https://www.expensesorted.com/

Looking forward to your feedback!

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Very cool!

I do my business expense categorization manually and once a year. I thought that the categorization took the most time, but this year I timed it, and doing the imports took the longest (because I have multiple bank accounts, multiple cards) - log in, figure out how to export as csv, export, realize that I need to export with different settings, find that, repeat for all cards and bank accounts and transaction sources.

Does anyone know if there's something like YNAB but instead of only importing future transactions, something that will allow me to do historical import via Plaid? Would pay $50/mo if it worked really well. I'm hoping there'd be something that'd allow me to get a historical import of transactions.

It'd be great if with one click I could get all of my transactions from every bank account and every card during the 2023 year, and including transaction details that exist on payment provider websites but not on the bank/card (e.g. Paypal, venmo, Apple, Amazon transactions where the detail of what the purchase was is not shown on the statement), all into one spreadsheet, and then put them into this tool.

Yes there is! You should check out Tiller Money. They offer a Google Sheet addon that let's you import transactions from different bank accounts (I assume using Plaid).

This is something I'm interested in building too, but I worry the API keys are quite expensive and thus requiring a bit of investment / risk prior to building the solution.

Thank you!

This is a great use of ML! I run a data engineering company, but in the past I worked as a controller and I think Finance controllers need better tools. Your idea of embedding ML into the spreadsheet is really a good one. I can see accounting teams and controllers using a tool like yours to control expenses, reconcile bank transactions, manage cost categories for management reporting.

Thank you. Do they mainly use spreadsheets? What sort of structure is the data in?

They mainly use Excel spreadsheets, but Excel supports add-ons in Typescript now (haven't tried building one though). This is data like invoices, bank transactions, accounting postings, cost center data, cost center mappings, income statement, balance sheet.

Interesting. Guess that would enable an easy hookup to services like Replicate to support with ML.

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