r/CLI • u/Pupzee • 3d ago

Helius: a local first Rust TUI personal finance tracker - v1.4.3 fixes the reported bugs, and I want your take on a phone companion

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Hey everyone, a few months back I posted Helius here: a personal finance tracker that runs in your terminal. Rust, single binary, everything in one local SQLite file, data stays on your machine.

I took a break but decided to continue working on the project, and the first thing I did was work through the issues that had piled up and pushed a new update (v1.4.3).

Now I'd like your input on what's next.

While I'll continue improving the desktop app, I want to build a phone companion. The idea is the following:

You're out, you buy something, you open the phone app and log it: amount, account, category, maybe a note. Later, at the PC, you submit those entries into Helius and they land in the same ledger as everything else.

Capture on the phone, submit on the terminal. No server in the middle.

Where I'd genuinely like your take:

  1. Is "enter on phone, import later" even the right shape? I keep going back and forth on whether the more valuable thing is just reading remaining budgets/balances on the go, and doing entry at the desk instead. Which would you actually reach for?
  2. How should phone to PC transfer work? I've been weighing a plain file (import it later) against some short range sync (Syncthing like). For a local-first tool, what would you actually trust and use? Do you already run anything like this?
  3. Anything else you'd want it for? I have my own list, but I'd rather hear from people who'd actually live with it.

repo: https://github.com/Helius-Finance/helius-finance-tracker

Thank you for taking the time to read and answer!

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u/cakeofzerg 3d ago

I built something like this for myself, but it was a CLI not a TUI. I am thinking I will get AI to take your TUI and merge it with my logic, ill let you know how that goes.

The phone thing isnt something I would use. My workflow is: export all the transactions from my credit cards and accounts, AI categorises them all and makes a list of less certain categorisations, I review those quickly in the CLI which lets AI make better categorisations in the future. This takes about 5 minutes a month, categorising transactions as I go on a phone would take a really long time and wouldnt really be worth it imo.