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My wife was a diehard YNAB user before we met but it went by the wayside once we merged finances. She wanted to get back to better managing our money and starte
by ad_fontes 24d ago
My wife was a diehard YNAB user before we met but it went by the wayside once we merged finances. She wanted to get back to better managing our money and started using Google Sheets and then got stuck. She asked me for help trying to create a pivot table and like any good engineer, I built her an entirely new application instead.
In my defense though, it does way more than a spreadsheet. Stuff like OCRing screenshots of bank transactions with a specialized, locally-hosted LLM to avoid data harvesters like Plaid. This became an entirely separate subsystem with verification, automated model benchmarking, prompt provenance, etc.
You'd be surprised at how quickly edge cases start to pile up when an accounting system makes contact with the real world. (If you buy something on a credit card and then return it after your statement closes but before your payment is due, do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase? Well... depends on your bank. Capital One and Chase: yes, US Bank: no.)
> Just how much functionality are you getting out of that?
I'm still dogfooding it. It's a pretty opinionated app that has things a month-end closing ceremony, reconciliation processes, envelope-based budgeting cycles. So unfortunately my feedback cycle is largely locked to the calendar. But my wife absolutely loves it so far.
- zzrrt 24d ago> do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase? I'm skeptical that the UX is improved much by having the app know the answer. The bank tells you what to pay, a month beforehand. The user has to get that number from the bank anyway, to be sure they don't incur fees. Your app should just pull it from the statements, not independently calculate it.
- ksaun 24d agoThat's a valid point. But ad_fontes was describing an edge case and that was an excellent example of one (regardless of whether it was an important or necessary feature).
- zzrrt 22d agoI don't think it was a good example to justify the complexity of the app, if it doesn't make sense to put in the app. It's an example of adjacent concerns, so maybe there is something similar that should be in the app, but the exact example is not necessary or useful to the specific app being discussed.