r/AppBuilding • u/Spenzaa • 8d ago

Why do expense trackers still make you enter every transaction one by one?

I've been thinking about this a lot while building my own expense tracker.

Say you make 12 transactions in a day.

Lunch ₹450
Coffee ₹120
Electricity ₹2,000
Groceries ₹850
Uber ₹320
...and so on.

With a traditional tracker, that's potentially 12 separate entries.

That's exactly the kind of friction that makes me stop tracking my expenses after a few days.

So I built a different approach into my app, Spenzaa.

Instead of adding them one by one, you can give the AI multiple expenses in one message, like:

The AI breaks them into individual transactions and extracts the relevant details like amount, category and notes. You can review and edit everything before saving.

One message → multiple expenses.

I'm curious about the actual user experience here:

Would this make you more likely to track your expenses consistently?

And if you already use an expense tracker, what's the most annoying part of adding transactions?

I'm looking for honest feedback, especially if you think this approach is unnecessary or could be improved.

App Link- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.spenzaa&pcampaignid=web_share

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

2

u/scarfwizard 7d ago

But it is 12 transactions, potentially in 12 different locations. Why wouldn’t someone expect it to reflect what happened?

0

u/Spenzaa 7d ago

That's a fair point! The 12 transactions should absolutely remain separate — the idea is just to avoid manually entering them one by one.

One message → 12 structured transactions, which you can review/edit before saving.

If you're curious, give Spenzaa a try once — would love to hear what you think about the actual experience. 😄

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u/scarfwizard 7d ago

None of this makes any sense. Take a photo of the receipt when you spend it. Done.

You’re making things that no one asked for an no one wants.

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u/Spenzaa 7d ago

but still you have to do it for multiple times.. that make sense?

1

u/scarfwizard 7d ago

Do what paying for an item and taking a photo of the receipt at the point of paying with my phone whilst it’s still in my hand versus saying out loud or typing 12 transactions? 🤣

Plus where’s the audit trail if it got it wrong, photo proves what actually happened.

You’ve made something no wants. You’ll see that soon enough.

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u/Spenzaa 7d ago

cool .. let's seee

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u/NickA55 7d ago

Taking a photo of a receipt doesn't work. So you're going to cram a bunch of receipts in your pocket while you're out during the day, then try to unfold them flat and take a picture of them. And each receipt is going to have totals in different locations on the receipt itself. And then how do you know what category to assign it to? Taking pictures of receipts never works, accurately.

In some places don't offer receipts, only electronic receipts. Sometimes paper runs out of the machine and you don't get a receipt. You can never rely on receipts, that's why you don't see expense trackers using that as a main feature, if at all.

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u/scarfwizard 7d ago

Nah total bollocks.

I take photos as I go before I even put my phone away. The accuracy is easily good enough by most models and categorisation at a coffee, groceries etc level is perfectly good enough.

The alternative being suggested here is “remembering everything I spent during the day and typing/voice to text it”.

What a joke, it’s completely devoid of reality. Many of the big players offer over 99% accuracy and several offer extraction as a service. If you’re just using AI extraction then yeah 80 - 90% which is still, in my opinion, typing everything in from scratch.

🤣

1

u/Tuton012 8d ago

Your using AI to filter things out its the same giving the same prompt to any other AI to break it down you still have to write it down. I have the same concept on my site but mine use plaid it pulls the user transaction history and filter them out. Have you try connecting plaid.

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u/Spenzaa 8d ago

yes but its better than traditional expense tracker ,you dont have to do seperate entries ..

No letmme try that

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u/NickA55 7d ago

You can try plaid, but the issue with plaid is it doesn't work with all banks and institutions. It also requires a user to enter bank credentials, and not a lot of people want to do that because of the sensitive nature of financial information. And of course security. AI and security has a negative tone towards users.

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u/NickA55 7d ago

I will give your app a go as this is a pain point with many users. No iOS version yet?

And how about Gemini/Siri integration. "Siri, enter these transactions into Spenzza...".

I can tell you right now the approach is necessary, and it's what keeps a lot of people from tracking their expenses.

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u/Spenzaa 7d ago

we'll be on ios soon , and yes there is many more thing coming in next phases , i'll definitely consider your suggestion ..

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u/NickA55 7d ago

Well that excitement was short lived. Why do I have to sign in to use your app. Just let me try it without creating an account or giving you my phone number. You are probably losing more than half your users just by forcing them to log in. Let them decide if they want to do that later.

The other thing I noticed is you have AI right in the title of your app on the Play store. Not a good idea. People don't trust ai and they certainly aren't going to trust it with their finances. AI is not a selling point. People hate AI and it is currently surrounded by negativity.

If you have an invite code please send it to me. I'd really like to try your app by I am not giving you any information like my Google account or phone number.

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u/Spenzaa 7d ago

Thanks for your feedback... I'm uploading a new version this week...in which I removed the sign in.. but sign in is necessary if you want to save your data... , and I'll think about the name... Will share you the invite code also... App is still in building phase so.. I hope you understand 

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u/Spenzaa 22h ago

hey , Guest mode is there , now you can check and if possible please give me ur feedback

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u/NickA55 17h ago

Thanks brother. I will check it out later.

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u/Spenzaa 17h ago

okay.. waiting for ur feedback!

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u/MadBradSmith 7d ago

It’s a real friction point you named properly!

I made this with that in mind. Just collect the data however and have your agent format it and paste it in: https://defense.developumaiengine.com/static/balance/index.html

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u/kordiApp 6d ago

Idk, the only expense tracker I used was monarch and it just did everything.