Comment by jwdunne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwdunne | Hacker News Reader

I like it! Very simple and easy to use.

Since I don't have any expenses I have to track for accounting purposes, I'm looking at this as a tool to track my own expenditure so as to help improve my spending habits. I realise the focus might be different so my suggestion may be useless to you!

What would be really useful to me would be reminders and notifications. With developing habits like this, I have a very hard time unless I'm constantly reminded. Like I take my lunch on weekdays at 12pm, so a reminder at half 12 or 1 would have me enter my lunch expenses. This could be further enhanced if you had a mobile app that used push notifications. This would be essential for me to develop the habit of doing it.

Ah thanks for the suggestions. That's something I've been thinking about a bit, I think it's a pain to enter expenses all the time. How do you feel about an email reminder in place of a push notification?

Email reminders could also work well.

My thinking with mobile push notifications would be you tap the notification and it takes you straight to a simple UI where you punch in the values.

It might be harder to reduce the friction as low as this with email notifications but it could work just as well. A simple link could work, or one step further is having a feature where you can specify expenditure and tags in the reply to an email in a certain format that's parsed by your app e.g:

$8, work, commuting $4.50, lunch

(Values in example may seem low because I'm British but dollar/pound symbol is neither here nor there in this case!)

Ultimately I would love to do a mobile app and it really wouldn't be that difficult to build, I guess I just wanted to gauge interest before dedicating more time. That's a really interesting suggestion about the email reply, I'm going to think about that a bit more!

I'd like to reply to my email with the expense and then tags on separate lines beneath it.

* -> email.

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