Show HN: PocketWise – a simple, natural-language double-entry finance tracker
pocketwise.appWorking on pocket wise. Yet another personal finance tracker :)
I started with double entry accounting using hledger and it was always great financial realization but I would stop using it after a couple of weeks. So I started writing a web interface for my ledger file, with the intent to make it simple enough that I actually stick with it. This became pocket wise over time.
Pocketwise does not need need any bank credentials, instead you do the data entry.
But to make it easier you can type (or say) natural language descriptions of your expenses like - "Chipotle $15 cash" or "Netflix 19.89 Apple Card" and it will store them as double entries like
2025-11-11 Chipotle
Expenses:Food & Dining $15.00
Assets:Cash $-15.00
2025-11-11 Netflix
Expenses:Subscriptions $19.89
Liabilities:Credit Card:Apple Card $-19.89
How are you parsing the natural-language expense inputs into balanced double-entry transactions—are you using a rule-based grammar, a fine-tuned model, or an LLM-prompted parser, and how do you guarantee correctness (e.g., preventing unbalanced postings, ambiguous account inference, currency formatting drift, or daylight-saving-related timestamp inconsistencies) before writing to the ledger?
Consider me old-fashioned, but I have never been comfortable with my financial data sitting in someone else’s domain. Especially a third-party domain. General summary reports for legal or taxation on hard copy is one thing, the nitty gritty details in easily siphonable electronic format is a thorough hell naw.
Unless this is an installable app capable of doing 99% of everything offline and under my complete control, thanks but no thanks.