alt Hacker NewsThat’s a fair point. Automated bank imports sound essential at first, especially with many accounts and cards.
In practice, though, I found them less useful for budgeting than expected. A bank statement tells you how much was spent and where, but not what the expense actually was. “$100 at a supermarket” could be groceries, pet food, a lawn mower, or business expenses — that context is what makes budgeting meaningful, and it usually has to be added manually anyway.
At that point, entering the expense directly with the right category often turned out to be simpler and more accurate for me. Automated access would still be nice for reconciliation, but it’s not the silver bullet it’s often perceived to be.
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This was true, but today I would much rather have an llm categorize my expenses. Me doing it manually will never happen.
This is something I kept bumping into when building my own tracker (Simple Wallet - https://simplewallet.app).
You're right that "$100 at a supermarket" is useless but I found even knowing "I spent $400 on groceries" wasn't that useful either. I kept asking myself "okay, but on what?"
So I leaned hard into making categories the starting point instead of the endpoint. Groceries breaks down into what I'm actually buying. Turns out I was spending way more on coffee than I realized.
Did you ever consider going deeper into categories, or do you find users just want the high level view? I've been torn on how much detail is actually helpful vs. overwhelming.