Show HN: Mini-spend-tracker – a self-hosted server for tracking your spendings(github.com)

17 pointsby martinlev3 anni fa4 comments

Show HN: Mini-spend-tracker – a self-hosted server for tracking your spendings

https://github.com/martinlevesque/mini-spend-tracker

2 comments

JZL0033 anni fa

You can use the email alerts from banks/credit cards to automatically fill out purchase information across all credit cards. Google pub sub let's you get notified when it happens within milliseconds and then you just have to parse the emails

It's the best way I've found to get a cross company 'api' for purchases

Also chat bots like telegram will work well this

swah3 anni fa

In 2023, Brazilian banks continue to send half of their notifications exclusively via Push and the other half solely through email. This week, I once again endeavored to streamline the tracking process.

Here's what I did: I utilized an Android phone (which can be a secondary device) for the bank apps, and forwarded both notifications and emails to an Airtable base using Tasker+AutoNotification plugin and Zapier, respectively. This base served as the input for my automation scripts, which are also hosted on Airtable, though a self-hosted script might be more efficient. I set up the automation to run daily or weekly, sending emails and adding calendar events for my expenses.

Ideally, this functionality would be integrated into the bank's system as a simple plugin, but it seems they're not keen on helping customers save money or monitor their spending since Monday.

One advantage of using Airtable as the initial input is the ability to review items and remove (or rather, check a new column titled "ignore this") them before the automations execute. This is still a work in progress, but it's already proving useful.

(edit: rewritten with GPT4)

leipert3 anni fa

Have you had a look into plain text accounting like e.g. https://beancount.github.io/ ?

Also written in Python, loads of tooling around it. Might be even good “just” as the database.

martinlev3 anni fa

hey I wasn't aware of this project - definitely looks interesting with significant number of features+plugins. In my case I wanted something fairly simple which I can setup on a personal server/NAS, and which I can use to fill new spendings per category with a browser, and visualize variations per category over time.