Introducing Yet Another Finance App

My (desperate) attempt at using LLMs to stop my money from vanishing every month

Before I explain what this is all about, click on the Add button in the sandbox below and then click on the card that appears. If you get the idea, feel free to try some prompts of your own.

The idea is this: it's easy enough to use a google sheet to manage your personal expenses, i.e. plan out your liabilities and budgets, and so on.

But the really difficult part (at least for me) is keeping track of every day expenses. So things like:

• ordering food
• buying groceries
• eating out
• shopping
• ...and other miscellaneous stuff

I've tried to keep track of these small and scattered expenses in different ways, but there's so much friction associated with doing it that I inevitably abandon the endeavor.

This means I'm not able to track my adherence to budgets (on a granular level) and I lose the opportunity to analyze my spending habits and improve them.

I think this is an area where LLMs and tech can be really useful: eliminating that friction. So these are the some of the ways in which I've tried to eliminate this friction via this app:

• You can write a short prompt in natural language (like above)
• You can upload the screenshot/digital receipt/picture of physical receipt of an expense directly (and optionally add a text prompt to add context not in the image):

• The app is a PWA (Progressive Web App). So if you open the app from your mobile browser and start using it, you should be able to install it to your device and add it to your home screen for quick access (like a native android/ios app):

A great benefit of this is that you can share text (and in the future, images) directly to the app:

You can access the actual YAFA app here. You will have to log in via google (or email/password combo) to try it out.

I'm already using it for myself and definitely feel like there's a lot less friction in the whole process.

Here are the next few features I'm going to work on to further improve the experience:

• Add the ability to share an image directly to the app (like the text sharing example above)
  • this is more tricky than the text part because it involves handling image data received in a POST request
• Use websockets instead of the current request-response api. Images take a significant time to process end-to-end so I don't want to wait for it. This will allow me to show better loading UI.
• Start adding analytics, i.e. a way to search the data for useful insights. E.g. How much did I spend on groceries/food in the past month, and so on. Still thinking about whether LLMs will add any value here or if using them for this use case will be overkill.
• Right now you can't upload images greater than 4.5Mb because of limitations on the payload size for vercel's serverless functions. Need to figure out a way around it. (I'm already compressing the images on the server, but I need to get the image to the server first lol)

In the meanwhile, I'm going to publish more blogs about my journey of building this application and all the things I've learned in that process. Stay tuned :)