
Show HN: Spendy – a simple money tracker (iOS app) - wingerlang
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6084360/Spendy.html
======
wingerlang
So I've been working with iOS for over a year. Some employed time, freelance
and I've hung around a lot in the jb-community.

Despite that I did not have one finished application of my own, lots of
prototypes, but nothing in the App Store. So this is my first one, it is
highly targeted to me, which you will notice if you read some of the text in
the link. But I hope it is also something others will like.

Link to app in the App Store:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spendy/id872831308?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spendy/id872831308?mt=8)

Anyway, I thought I'd just post it here because why not.

~~~
bitserf
Good job shipping! This was the kind of app I first worked on as well, but I
never ended up putting it on the store, and kind of lost interest halfway
through porting it to iOS 7 :)

The Add Transaction screen was pretty much where I lived in my app
([http://imgur.com/DobW80r](http://imgur.com/DobW80r)), so good work keeping
it simple and efficient!

Some feedback:

* Might be worth making the user's current currency (you can get it from NSLocale) the default currency so that out of the box on first use they can start entering data, it's not great to have to go to settings first time you use it.

* If you must stick with hamburger menu, consider making the view tappable everywhere and not just on the hamburger icon, to dismiss it. Though I would argue it's worth using something like UITabBar to switch between log and charts if charts is something you use a lot.

* When tapping on a transaction to bring up the context buttons, consider allowing tapping anywhere on the screen to dismiss it, not just on cells.

* Consider a custom input view for the amount field, here's an example of what I did for my app ([http://imgur.com/yp27cxK](http://imgur.com/yp27cxK)), gets rid of the ugly "dialer" style ABC/DEF/GHI annotations. More maintenance though.

* Understand its for you mainly, but tag editing would be nice :)

* When you have a couple of thousand transactions in there (I had 20,000), being able to quickly whip up some adhoc queries for interesting stats becomes a lot easier if you have an SQL backed data model, and I used SQLite+transactions just because I was paranoid of some stupid bug corrupting all the data. Knowing myself, I would delete an app the first time it lost any data.

However, long term, I think the solution for this kind of app is direct
integration with banks (one of the reasons I lost interest, because I started
getting super tired of typing in the data on a phone)!

Best of luck, and keep on iterating! Never forget what the first version of
popular slick apps looked like, a lot of them were pretty basic.

~~~
wingerlang
I hadn't thought about the NSLocale but that sounds like something that would
suit well, especially since another guy mentioned the currency at "first
launch".

Tag editing is something which is in the works.

I use, as you might read, a plain text file now. But I do miss writing queries
and I am looking at SQLite.

I've mentioned this a couple of times now, but where I'm from we don't have
bank APIs. But I wish we did. I kind of like manually entering things though,
keeps my mind on "what am I spending money on".

Anyway thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: Saw your input view and that does look nice, especially the + - buttons,
smooth. I might implement this actually. It has happened once or twice that I
wanted to do some addition.

------
brianwillis
I've been using the YNAB[1] app for expense tracking, and I'm pretty happy
with it.

It has a nice feature where it records the retailer's location using the
iPhone's location services, so when you enter new transactions for a retailer
you've been to before it can automatically guess the payee and category. After
a week or two, the app had learnt the payees I used the most, so entering
transactions became super fast.

The downside with YNAB is that you must sync it with a desktop version of
their app. The iOS/Android apps are free, but only support a small subset of
the desktop app's functionality.

With YNAB there's also a whole financial management system that they want you
to buy into. It works well for me, but might not meet everyone's mental model
of how personal finance should work.

[1]: [http://www.ynab.com/](http://www.ynab.com/)

~~~
wingerlang
I've heard a lot of good about YNAB, but I don't need something so extensive.

I have had thoughts about the learning-thing but I hadn't thought about using
location also, which sounds smart.

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kylec
I almost closed the tab when I saw the screenshots of the "other apps". They
all look pretty terrible and because I hadn't actually read anything on the
page yet when I saw them, I assumed they were screenshots of your app. I would
suggest that you lead with screenshots of your app, especially since it looks
a lot nicer.

~~~
wingerlang
Hm, maybe I should yes. Glad you scrolled down though^^ Thanks for the
feedback.

------
markdown
I miss these Show HN project writeups. They're what drew me to HN in the first
place, but these days I'm lucky to see one good one per week.

Excellent work, OP. It looks like you're a unicorn.. or could be one with a
bit more design polish :)

~~~
encoderer
I posted one this week with a partner (we were pleased with the results,
though it was hard to stay on the front page for more than an hour).

I think a weekly Show/Ask HN roundup post could be really helpful.

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jak1192
Great app, I've been looking for a simple, bare bones budget tracking app.

I think you need to fix the flow for the first time users. If every first time
user must add a currency, why not have first time user screen be the add
currency screen? Also, the add currency screen should have suggestions. It
wasn't initially clear that I needed to type 'USD' instead of 'dollar'. It
also wasn't clear that the currency needed to be in capital letters. I had usd
in lowercase and clicking the check mark did nothing. There should at least be
feedback.

The app is great once getting past the first screen. Nice job.

~~~
wingerlang
I will take notes, I have been thinking about the "onboarding" process and I
do agree with all of your feedback. Thanks.

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paglia_s
I don't have an iPhone so I can't try it but I read on the website "As you can
see, there is no "exchange rate" here. I decided to keep as much data
separated as possible since a user may want to change their currencies
around."

Not storing the exchange rate if the rate changes a lot don't you risk having
a value that might not be correct?

For example if my main currency is EUR and I store a transaction of 5 US $
with an exchange rate of 1€ = 1.3$ then if one week later it becomes 1€ = 2$.

~~~
wingerlang
I am aware of this and I am thinking of a solution for it.

I might just add a "download rate history" into a map[date>rate] and do all
calculations with that.

And when exporting it would get correct values in the CSV.

------
larrywallace
This app looks great, but the only negative for me is that it does offer the
ability to take a camera snapshot of a real receipt. Some other apps have this
receipt snapshot feature, but not the simplicity of your app. For me this
snapshot feature alone would complete the perfect app in this category, and
for this reason alone I am holding off on the purchase.

~~~
wingerlang
Well the app is free with a small in-app unlock for (atm) Dropbox, unlimited
tags and the different colors.

Anyway, I posted a comment about the snapshot here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928331](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928331)

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elitrium
One of the first things I did after installing, is turned off the
notifications and badge icon in iOS settings.

It doesn't look like this can be changed within the app. It only provides the
option of changing the content that's displayed. This was an initial turn off
for me, but other than that I'm really happy with this!

~~~
wingerlang
I am not sure what you mean, could you explain further?

~~~
elitrium
My mistake, I actually installed the wrong app.

------
aaronm14
Thanks for the write up, I enjoyed the explanation of even the little details
throughout the app.

~~~
wingerlang
Glad you liked it! If you use RSS you can add this link [0]. I enjoyed writing
this so I'll probably do it again when I finish any other projects.

[0] [http://jontelang.com/blog/feed.xml](http://jontelang.com/blog/feed.xml)

~~~
aaronm14
Great, thanks, subscribed!

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jpb0104
This is great. I built my own web app budgeting solution. I've been working on
and personally using [https://budgetmyway.com/](https://budgetmyway.com/) for
a while now. I love budgeting. Looking for feedback.

------
j-rom
This looks pretty cool. One question though: Is the "Tap again to confirm"
button active before the animation ends? For example, what if the user
accidentally double taps the delete button?

~~~
wingerlang
I just tried it a couple of times and it appears it is not active while
animating, which is good.

EDIT: It appears the method I use disables gestures by default. Semi relevant
stack overflow: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7337363/how-to-
recognize-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7337363/how-to-recognize-
tap-gesture-while-a-view-is-animating)

------
8ig8
Excellent overview. I love these.

One feature I may have missed is reconciliation. That is, some way to review
my manually entered transactions with statements provided by my bank.

~~~
wingerlang
I just mentioned this to someone in an email. I am not from the US, so the
bank providing an API is very foreign to me.

Anyone else from Sweden here? Do we have something like this that I do not
know of?

But the gist of it, unless I am misunderstanding something, is that I cannot
implement it (bank integration).

~~~
tobbel
Swede here. As far as reconciliation goes, from my understanding it's
basically just making sure whatever's listed in the app and what's on your
internetbank matches up. YNAB does this quite well, letting you edit
transactions if something does not match, and marking a post as reconciled
(i.e. it matches up to your bank statement). Good summation here:
[http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/how-to-
reconci...](http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/article/how-to-reconcile)

Also, we went to school together :) Good job on the app, congrats on HN first
page!

~~~
wingerlang
I see, I skimmed the article and I guess that's something to look into
further, thanks for the link.

And tjenare ^^ Hope all is well man

------
ragsagar
I was looking for a similar app for android. Is there one?

~~~
deet
I'd take a look at Financius
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.code44.fin...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.code44.finance)).
The design is fairly clean and the development is done in the open, which is
nice.

I'm also working on something in a similar space. If you have specific needs
I'd love to talk (see my profile).

------
johnpowell
This is great and might just replace my trusty Moleskine.

------
cstrat
Nice work.

I have tried heaps of apps for this, 'cost' and 'spendee' are the ones I found
to be the best so far. Will give yours a try soon.

~~~
wingerlang
Those are the ones I liked the most also! But not enough to keep me away from
Xcode. Let me know what you think.

------
philiphodgen
Downloaded. Entered my first transaction. I like the fact that it attempts to
do only one thing. Simple is good.

~~~
wingerlang
That's what I was going for so that's good to hear, thanks.

------
vmiroshnikov
Take a look at [http://coinkeeper.me/](http://coinkeeper.me/)

~~~
wingerlang
Neat. Although it seems, after a download, that it is also a budgeting tool.
It greets me with "how much do you want to spend each month" and have balances
for accounts.

While I can definitely see why people want this, I don't. I just want to track
my expenses.

I will play around with it some more though, it looks like a fresh take on the
app types.

Is it yours?

~~~
vmiroshnikov
I'm not the owner, but I like that app. I think its possible to just track
your expenses, but its impossible to take money from "nowhere" so you have to
have at least one account. In this case you'll have negative balance on that
account which will be set to 0 each month.

As for "How much do you want to spend each month", its not mandatory but gives
a new user an idea how to use all app features.

------
jedmeier
This looks great. Works well and very simple to use. What about a way to take
photo of the receipt?

~~~
wingerlang
Again I've thought about that but I am not sure how I will do it in regards to
the data, which is in CSV format.

Each entry does have a unique UNIX timestamp, I might just drop all receipts
in a folder and have the names of them linked to the timestamp.

How does that sound?

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apas
Seems very nice (congrats on shipping!) but for the love of god please change
the app icon.

~~~
wingerlang
I am not very capable with designing icons.

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hrrsn
Great looking app. I would use this so much if there was two way Dropbox sync.

~~~
wingerlang
I will definitely work on that as it is something I want too.

~~~
hrrsn
I'm mostly interested in that because I have a custom scraper script pulling
data from my bank on a Raspberry Pi at home, adding two way sync would make it
super useful.

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abhididdigi
Is there an API exposed? BTW, I'm loving this app! Thanks!

~~~
wingerlang
I am not even sure how or what that would be used or even done. Like "open in
.." stuff? Or could you give me some example or use cases? I like the sound of
an API!

