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> There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. It was an a
by vinceguidry 11y ago
> There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided.
It was an act of faith for me to structure the app around manual entry of transactions. I thought for sure that I'd wind up abandoning it after a few months. Didn't happen, I'm still using it, but I remember for a few weeks struggling to eliminate the friction, and I still haven't gotten rid of all of it. That would require implementing some kind of custom keyboard, as well as the aforementioned interface to put in common transactions that have the same amount each time.
There needs to be a streamlined interface for adding these common transactions, because I might have to do it a few times a month.
I'm repeating this entire process for a to-do manager, as Reminders just doesn't eliminate enough friction for all use cases. Now I need to figure out how to get transactions to live on the same page as my agenda.
When I'm finally done with this three years from now, I'll need to write a book and do a bunch of YouTube videos to teach people how to use it productively, either that or I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable.
What other people will need out of a dashboard is bound to be completely different than what I need out of it. I have a list of transactions for this week, broken down by day, someone else might need the whole month, broken down by category. I don't have automatic recurring transactions show up, someone else might want those. Each of these requires significant design work.
I have tried at various points to interest someone else in helping me develop it. Ha. Ha. Ha. Nobody cares.
- maxerickson 11y agoYou could look at the ecosystem around the Ledger command line accounting program for ideas about simplifying transaction creation. People often bring up Ledger because it uses a text file as input, I don't mean to point at that, I mean to point at all the various heuristics people use to extract meaning from their history of transactions.
- vinceguidry 11y agoI'll take a look at it, thanks.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoThe canonical budgeting advice is to simply track when you pull cash out, and count any cash you withdraw as already "spent".
- djrogers 11y agoThat's hardly 'canonical', and goes directly against many budgeting/tracking philosophies. It definitely doesn't solve the 'where'd it all go' problem, and teaches you nothing about your spending habits and patterns. Of course if you don't have any money problems, and don't need to break bad spending habits, then go ahead and do it that way - I often do as well.
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoOf course it teaches you stuff about your spending habits and patterns. Cash withdrawals are either earmarked as you withdraw them (for example, hitting an ATM up before visiting a strip club or bar), or they're withdrawn for facilitating impulsive purchases. You know the category of things they go to, because you record it when you withdraw it - you just don't know exactly what you did with it or when.
- jimbokun 11y agoI think this only works if you follow a "zero based budgeting" philosophy. https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/zero-based-budget-what-why https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/zero-based-budget-what-why
- bitserf 11y agoGood on you for persisting with it. I developed a mobile manual entry personal finance tracking application as well, stuck with it for two years, but I'm back to manual entry using Ledger because of the pain in the ass it is to enter data on mobile, whereas I can use automation to import my various bank accounts data (e.g. https://github.com/cantino/reckon https://github.com/cantino/reckon) with Ledger. The reporting on the data is the gold, for me, the mobile app didn't really add that much value, so I just gave up.