
Show HN: Penny, an easy way to track your spending - adennis4
https://www.pennyapp.io/
======
bvanslyke
"Where did my money go" budgeting has never worked for me. I've been way more
successful with planning ahead every $ of income as I get it and then manually
tracking expenses. Budgeting had to become an actual activity for me, and not
just something done automatically by a webapp. I'm a huge shill for YNAB[0].
The software is really nice but basically it's a glorified (paid) spreadsheet.
My fiance and I agree that the methodology it forces you to use, though, has
easily saved us thousands so far.

[0][http://youneedabudget.com](http://youneedabudget.com) \- they recently
upgraded to a subscription based web app but I'm still using the classic
version that's a one time purchase:
[http://classic.youneedabudget.com](http://classic.youneedabudget.com)

~~~
kdamken
I couldn't agree more - I tried mint for a while and I basically did nothing
with it besides checking my transactions.

YNAB completely changed how I view my money. Now when I go to buy something, I
don't just go spend. I see how much I have in that category, and if it's not
enough, I either move money to it from another category, or not buy it.

It's been very helpful for me in my goal of saving more than 50% of my take
home pay.

~~~
HerpDerpLerp
Shame it has gone subscription only :( I hate ongoing charges for that sort of
thing.

~~~
kdamken
Yea I've been on the fence about trying that out, especially since it's
missing some key features (reporting, the calculator). At least YNAB4 is
supported til the end of 2016, gives them time to get the new one fixed up.

~~~
hyperbovine
YNAB Classic would not be that hard to replicate as a foss project. After the
recent switch I am very tempted to do this.

------
jbob2000
The unfortunate thing about apps like these is that if you are wise enough to
use it, you are wise enough to not need it.

Totally anecdotal, but the people I know who have trouble managing money are
just completely unaware of it. Money goes in and money goes out, and they only
do something if someone calls them or sends them a letter. As soon as you show
these people the numbers, they get it. It clicks for them.

Mint and Penny both suffer from the same thing those "hire a maid" apps suffer
from; Once I've made the initial contact, I have no reason to continue to use
the service, I can just contact the maid directly. Same thing with Mint/Penny;
Once I am shown my finances, I have an awareness of my financial situation and
don't need the service any more.

What will drive me to continually use this service, beyond my initial few
weeks? You can only analyze my finances so much before there is nothing left
to tell me. And then you will get to the point that Mint is at, where you
start offering me credit cards and credit reports and mortgages, because
that's the only thing left to do in this space.

~~~
fibbery
I totally disagree about Mint. I have accounts across so many different
services (bank, credit cards, loans, investments) and it saves me so much time
because I only have to log in one place and I can see the full picture of my
finances. I also like the trends feature so I can breakdown spending into
different categories. Plenty of financial services have stats on their sites,
but mint unifies all of them.

~~~
jbob2000
Ah, fair enough! That is not an issue for me, all of my accounts, cards, and
investments are with one bank. Perhaps I have downplayed the importance of
these services because of that.

------
cosinetau
"and you hereby appoint Penny as your true and lawful attorney-in-fact and
agent, with full power of substitution and resubstitution, for you and in your
name, place and stead, in any and all capacities, to access third party
internet sites, servers or documents, retrieve information, and use your
accounts, passwords, and other information"

Lol, no.

~~~
hardwaresofton
I think this might (should?) be standard phrasing for any app that accesses
another company's API on your behalf...

We may not think of it this way, but this seems like correct legalese for any
sort of assistant app, whether it takes your username and password, or you
give it an API key.

~~~
dontmitch
That was our understanding too.

One thing to clarify: it's just me and one other guy (imalex) working on this,
although we're hoping to hire another person soon. We're not trying to screw
anyone over with the privacy policy. We just don't know anything about
legalese, so we relied on existing terminology.

~~~
hardwaresofton
Congratulations on shipping! I wouldn't worry about complaints like this too
much, it kind of happens a bunch on hn.

Have you studied what mint and personal capital are doing right/wrong? Just
wanted to say a word of caution as I've heard of different banks making life
hard for mint.

~~~
tcfunk
AFAIK they won't experience the same issues as Mint until they achieve a
similar userbase size. The complaints from the banks was the server load that
Mint was putting on them for information they felt users potentially weren't
using.

~~~
toomuchtodo
So silly. They should've just provided Mint with a dedicated endpoint on a
dedicated server or two in their colo. Load problem solved.

------
david_p
Looks useful and neat, but remember kids: if you're not paying for it, you're
the product. Some of their competition: [http://linxo.com](http://linxo.com)
(used it for 5 years now), [http://bankin.com](http://bankin.com) (used once,
preferred linxo).

~~~
Sujan
Fascinating that they are both French only...

For the German market there are
[https://www.centralway.com/](https://www.centralway.com/) and
[http://www.epost.de/privatkunden/epostapp/banking-app-
kontop...](http://www.epost.de/privatkunden/epostapp/banking-app-
kontopilot.html)

~~~
david_p
I guess that's because I'm french myself and selected services that work in my
country :)

------
dkyc
This looks great, really good UX/UI from a first glance. My bank has a pretty
modern banking app, so some of the features (like spending graphs) are
familiar to me (though not as pretty as in Penny).

Two things that I dislike with my banking app:

\- No real differentiation between fixed, monthly cost and variable expenses.
It would be nice if the automatically separated monthly expenses and one-time
expenses.

\- Lots of "-$100 Cash" transactions whenever I use an ATM. This is my main
concern actually. It's really hard to have some sort of insight about my
finances without seeing the biggest part of my non-expenditure spending: The
stuff I pay for in cash. Especially since it distorts the monthly overviews:
If I retrieve $500 from my bank account on July 31st, it's not helpful to add
that to my July spending, since 90% of that money will probably be spent in
August. This is really a data-entry/UX problem, no API will solve this. One
thing that I would suggest: Make an extension that makes it really simple to
"scan" receipts. Just one glance of the camera, some OCR and the data is in
there. If it's simple enough, it may become part of my "muscle memory" to scan
receipts with the app whenever I buy something, so I get meaningful analysis
results.

(By the way, if you want to build something like that, check out this API:
[https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html](https://scanbot.io/de/sdk.html) \- great
product & company, I'm not affiliated in any way)

~~~
zrail
Simple method: don't pay cash. At this point the only thing I use cash for is
the occasional Powerball ticket.

~~~
dkyc
I try to, but there is all kinds of scenarios where I revert back to cash: I
have to have cash in my wallet anyway for things like parking tickets, so
sometimes when I'm in a rush I use it. Or for example when I purchase
something via card, and split the cost later on with somebody. He pays me back
in cash, and it's back in my wallet.

------
onion2k
Does it know what category to put something in if I use cash?

From my experience tracking what I spend, it's those transactions that I
actually need to keep track of if I'm going to spend money more sensibly. All
of the headline, automated bills that get paid monthly are easy to manage.
It's the little transactions of a few bucks here and there that add up to that
"Where the hell did this month's wages go?!" feeling.

If there isn't a good way to track cash transactions then it's not likely to
change the way I handle my money, and consequently it wouldn't be very useful
for me.

------
cookiecaper
I'm not really into the simulated live chat interface. It'd be a lot easier to
click a button that said "Your spending" than to type out "Please show me my
monthly spending Mr. Robot" (or to type out anything, especially on a phone).

~~~
dontmitch
There's actually not a lot of typing involved since the responses are pre-
populated for you. You can see an example of what that looks like on the
marketing page.

~~~
largote
This relies on you actually remembering the text commands though, as opposed
to just seeing the different buttons and taping whichever one you care about.

~~~
cookiecaper
It's kind of like a human-friendly CLI, so I can appreciate that, but I agree
that there should at least be clickable defaults.

~~~
dontmitch
Sorry for not being more clear: the responses are just buttons that you click.
For the majority of any conversation, there's no typing involved.

~~~
largote
Why would you use the screen real estate on a "conversation" then instead of
just showing the data?

~~~
Vraxx
If I had to guess it's probably because the conversational interface is
designed to be less intimidating than a barrage of data.

------
peterfile
Are you serious!? Every Paragraph in their Privacy section reads like: "We
totally won't collect your data; and definetly won't store them, BUT we kind
of do something similar and you just have to accept that" Nobody should ever
use this BS!

------
tdkl
Friendly chat bot facade, data collection/analysis in the background.

Aral Balkan couldn't be more spot on :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upu0gwGi4FE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upu0gwGi4FE)

------
largote
Why would I migrate from Mint to this?

~~~
jonaf
Because Mint has been horribly broken and useless from the day Intuit bought
it. Currently I use an excel spreadsheet in lieu of my now-inactive Mint
account. Because even nothing is better than mint.

~~~
cloakandswagger
Odd, I hear this complaint all the time but have never personally experienced
it. Mint has always worked for me, even with a bunch of esoteric 401k and
other accounts from no-name banks.

------
ionised
I tried using the Wallet app from Budget Bakers for a while and failed
miserably.

The app seemed fine but I could never consistently remember to enter all my
puchases into it right away. After a few days or even a week or more of
forgetting I would struggle to remember exactly what I spent and where,
especially from generic ATM withdrawals listed on my bank statement.

The app became useless for me because of that.

I really want a budgeting solution that works for me but haven't found one
yet, beyond just making an Excel spreadsheet of monthly incomings/outgoings
and then using that to work out what my remaining 'fun' money is.

------
dvcc
Although it looks great, I still have no idea if it supports different types
of accounts (loans, banks, etc.) or even if it supports my bank.

Looking around I don't see a list of supported accounts or account types. Is
it hidden somewhere?

~~~
Sujan
I had it easier: "Penny is currently only available in the United States" on
the app store already made it clear that it's not for me ;)

------
rdl
The utter lack of information about who is behind this ("Industry Veterans"
\-- who?) makes me exceedingly reluctant to trust this.

It's an iPhone app, so there's a minimal level of DUNS/screening/etc., but
enh.

------
donretag
I rather use a website over my phone to track my expenses. Having an app is
great, but a website is the topmost priority to have.

------
j_s
Another personal finance app soft-launched by an HN-er last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9095519](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9095519)

[http://family-fortune.ridgebit.com/](http://family-fortune.ridgebit.com/)

------
therobot24
this was posted not too long ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9942202](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9942202)

Though i can't tell if anything has changed since the last posting

------
cs0
Are you looking to expand into the UK any time soon? I would be interested in
using it.

~~~
dontmitch
We wish. A couple things that are stopping us: the transaction aggregator that
we use (Plaid) doesn't support international banks, and the UK/EU in
particular have stringent regulations on connecting to a bank account from a
third party service.

~~~
abritishguy
Check out [https://getmondo.co.uk/docs/](https://getmondo.co.uk/docs/)

------
jwineinger
"Bank-grade security"

What does that mean to you? Just an SSL cert of XXXX-bits?

~~~
bvanslyke
Maybe your password gets converted to its numeric phone keypad equivalent :V

[http://colin.keigher.ca/2016/01/bank-of-montreal-has-
horribl...](http://colin.keigher.ca/2016/01/bank-of-montreal-has-horrible-
password.html)

------
HerpDerpLerp
I wish all banks would have a read only feed of my data that I could give to
apps like this. (Though as I am in the EU there are actually very few that do
the integration (if any))

------
tryitnow
I just signed up for this. It looks pretty cool.

Can this connect to Venmo? Square cash? Or similar systems? That would be
neat.

------
morb
Unfortunate naming. There's also a ledger-like CLI finance app using the name
Penny. And I honestly thought that's what the submission was about.

[http://massysett.github.io/penny/](http://massysett.github.io/penny/)

------
jasdeepsingh
Any chance when this shall be available outside of the US App Store?

------
amackera
Love the idea. I wish I could use it (I'm Canadian).

~~~
grawlinson
I'm from New Zealand and every time I see something new that I'd be interested
in using, it's always US-exclusive.

The same applies for software, hardware, clothing and a lot of other things
now that I think about it.

------
rekshaw
please roll out to EU. Thanks

