Show HN: ExpenseOwl – Simple, self-hosted expense tracker

I built my own similar tool for my wife and I, with the same goal of making entering transactions as fast as possible, and one thing I found useful was predictive form filling.

Some categories have the same thing logged over and over (like for the "Gas" category I always made the title "Gas") so when you select the "Gas" category it prefills the title field with the most common transaction title for that category. Also works in reverse, if you enter the transaction title first it will guess the category.

I also optimized the date picker. We budget month to month, so when you're in this month's budget, all you have to select is the day. No need to select month and year, as so many default date pickers do.

Just some tidbits in case they interest you as well!

Built my own expense tracker on top of Teable.

I’m partly lucky because I live in Taiwan and almost any receipt here comes with itemised breakdown as a QR code, so I can scan that from my phone and pipe it off to a queue for ingestion

Didn’t want to use LLMs, but wanted automated categorisation of transactions, did that with some vector embeddings and Semantic Router (https://github.com/aurelio-labs/semantic-router).

… oh and it’s run off a RPi, yes the embeddings as well

Generally looks like a promising idea even in a deeply-competitive space, however the "selling point" of having pie charts to summarize your monthly spending does absolutely nothing for me - I know, banks etc use them in their marketing of "modern" online tools too, so they look kind of cool, but in practice for decision making about personal finance I find them absolutely useless. What I need to know on a regular basis, during a given month and at the end of the month, is: how much have I spent in general, compared with how much I planned to spend? Am I overspending in a particular category that I need to correct to keep my monthly budget on track, e.g. a fixed allowance for eating out per month, have I spent it all by week three or can I afford to have one more fancy dinner with my wife or with friends and still stay within my budget? Ninjinka's tips sound pretty positive about making the UI friction-free for keeping transactions up to date, because it's my responsibility to put good data in; however if the reporting/charts doesn't tell me anything actionable in an easy to read format then there's no point.

Thanks for building and sharing this!

A few years ago I did a deep dive on expense-tracking apps/services - ostensibly to write a big comparison blog post about them all - but that never happened - but really because I wanted something just like this but without all the bells and whistles that most apps have.

The two biggest gripes I remember having when I did that deep dive:

1) It sounds so simple, but most apps/services which promised "import your statements and we'll take care of the rest" simplicity fell down over the simplest issue: If I have my monthly rent auto-drafted, and some months it shows up on the 31st and other months on the 1st, for example, the apps absolutely could not handle that (and I'd have a month with double-rent showing in my breakdown).

2) I just had no interest in budgeting functionality built in. Lots of people do. I didn't - I just wanted to see a simple breakdown of expenses just like ExpenseOwl (hence my extra thank-yous). SO many apps assumed that budgeting functionality was a must-have that they over-complexified things and forced the user to enter budgets, etc.

That's cool and thanks for sharing! If you are looking for future direction generating reports by category and overall and ability to add attachment of PDF/photo receipts to individual items is really helpful. I use these type of tools to keep track of business expenses for my corp (employee n=me) for my accountant come tax time and have never found the right tool for it. Tried even abusing invoiceninja, craterapp, a few others outside their use case. Eventually I settled on paperless-ngx (pulls from scanner, email address off phone) manual entry into excel now seatable for this on this but still not ideal. Firefly III seemed useful but daunting. I don't need double ended accounting or care about budgeting where I spend money... just receipt, table, report, print all and end of year.

I wish I could figure out how to take pictures of receipts and OCR them into something like this.

Checked out the readme and the screenshots and this looks quite polished.

I didn't see anyway to connect with my bank accounts and pull this information. Would you be open to adding an integration like this? Maybe through Stripe financial connections, or the Plaid APIs?

I have been using Spliit (https://github.com/spliit-app/spliit). We've added over 5k transactions on it and don't have any complaints so far.

This reminds me of Kanboard in how focused and simple it is: https://kanboard.org

That's a really good thing, you don't always need heavyweight solutions with bunches of features that love to eat a lot of RAM (and CPU), sometimes a simpler option is fully sufficient.

Especially because this one doesn't try to tackle complex problems like auth, if it's for personal use, you can just put basicauth (over TLS), mTLS, OIDC (Relying Party) or whatever your heart desires in front of it.

Not sure if this beats an excel file shared on Google drive?

Looks like a solid project, will be interested in giving it a shot

Aside: I built my own expense tracker [1] as well to categorise expenses using LLMs as I needed a quick way to log the entries. I’ve been meaning to export these to Actual budget for a detailed analysis but haven’t done that yet.

[1]: https://github.com/mr-karan/gullak

I've been building something similar for calorie tracking as well. A lot of the apps I've tried don't let me add meals quickly enough (repeat meals from the past, or new ones) or let me enter calorie formulae, and there's a bunch of unnecessary features like goal-setting.

I'm glad that something like this exists!

I’ve been wanting something like this for a while. Was even thinking of building one myself. You beat me to it.

I like the simplicity. It’s just a quick add and then it’s in the pie chart. Think this could ever be integrated with bank spending automatically? I think that running locally would make you feel safe doing do.

I'll give this a go So far Actual Budget is pretty good, although I wish the dashboard was a bit more extensive.

I use a simple spreadsheet and I like inputting my transactions manually instead of automating imports. Makes me think twice about my spending. Spreadsheets are flexible enough so I can extend functionality if and when I want.

This looks super simple to pull into Sandstorm to provide authentication around it... so we're going to give it a try!

The UI looks nice, but feature wise, I think I would rather go with Firefly III. It is a lot more complete.

This is super cool!

I was looking for something like this just a few days ago. Ended up going with Flow[1], an open source Android app, because I wanted something that I could enter data on from my phone and run completely locally there. I don't yet have Tailscale running, or some other solution to access my homelab on the go. But it's great to see more and more software designed to run on people's local networks. And from the screenshots ExpenseOwl is the next tool I'd try if Flow doesn't work out... Getting Tailscale or a similar solution up and running is also on the to-do list.

I know other people want direct integration with banking APIs, but for me it's actually a feature to have to enter everything manually. I'm deliberately working on better spending habits, and having a local set of data with me which is actually sometimes ahead of my bank in terms of cleared transactions is good. It means I build the habit of entering and categorizing each time I spend money, and it means I have to regularly reconcile accounts. It's only a hypothesis, but I suspect in the era of checkbooks the practical fact of having to keep up the books manually enforced better spending habits.

[1a]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mn.flow.flow

[1b]: Also, github: https://github.com/flow-mn/flow

N.B. There's another expense tracker on the Play store, also called "Flow", which AFAICT isn't open source.

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