MoneyPouch - I hated tracking money in Excel, so I built my own tracker

Description and use

MoneyPouch is a self-hosted, open-source expense tracker built with Rails that emphasizes fast manual entry via keyboard shortcuts, supports USD currency and bank syncing through SimpleFin, and addresses privacy concerns by being self-hosted.

Problem

I hated tracking money in Excel because any sort of visualization or aggregate data involved needing to know how to work Excel.

Outcome

MoneyPouch provides a self-hosted, open-source expense tracker built with Rails that prioritizes fast manual entry via keyboard shortcuts, supports USD currency and bank syncing through SimpleFin, and addresses privacy concerns by being self-hosted.

Workflow

• Identified the need for an expense tracker that emphasizes quick manual entry over bank connections
• Chose Actual Budget as reference but disliked its look and wanted a free option
• Designed and built MoneyPouch with Rails, MIT license, self-hosted architecture
• Implemented keyboard shortcut-based quick transaction entry
• Integrated SimpleFin for bank syncing (USD only)
• Provided a demo site at demo.moneypouch.app and GitHub repository at github.com/kenyounot123/moneypouch

Evidence

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.

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.

Actual Budget was the popular open-source one, but I didn't like how it looked, and I didn't want to pay for the paid options.

It's called MoneyPouch — Rails, MIT licensed, self-hosted and it emphasizes fast manual entry because I know some people are skeptical of trusting bank connections so I wanted to make it as easy as possible to log a transaction.

Data privacy is also something people worry about when using these trackers as well as what I worry about so I wanted this to be self-hosted and open source.