Why almost all personal finance apps suck and why PaperMoney won't

TLDR;
Almost all personal finance apps suck because they are indecent, wrong, unstable, not built on solid principles and methods, and are not smarter than autocomplete. We are building PaperMoney based on double-entry counting method to solve all these issues. You can check it out here.

And it's not news to you. You know in your heart that it sucks and that in 2024, managing your money shouldn't be harder than making it. But it does. Every existing app in the market falls short in so many ways. Let's see how.

They are not decent

Personal financial data is the most sensitive and private form of data. Because it's so sensitive, it's valuable, and some apps have turned into a revenue stream. They try to collect as much data as they can and sell it to advertisers, credit-cards, shady buy-now-pay-later companies and third parties.

They are wrong and brittle

Ever notice how your balances from your connected accounts are always off by some amount or show the balance two days late? How some transactions show up delayed, or never show up at all? Your bank account connections randomly get disconnected, locked out or get dropped. They blame it on the banks when in reality all these issues can be fixed with proper investment in engineering. Almost everyone is doing the bare minimum to get by, and it shows.

They are not based on solid principles

Your app is based on assigning categories to a list of transactions. Even though this method looks simpler, this is not how money should be tracked. It's more error-prone, and inflexible and makes everything else much harder.

They are not flexible enough

Since you don't have access to the data model of the app, you can only do things the apps let you do. If your app doesn't support tracking split bills, you cannot track split bills. There will always be use cases that your app won't support.

They are not smart

It's 2024, your fridge has been smart for over 15 years. We have AI models that can generate entire Hollywood movies and still the most your app can do is guess the category of a coffee transaction as makeup. Your personal finance app should do everything from categorization to helping you make smarter financial decisions.

Now these are well-funded apps by capable, well-funded and smart teams. The reason they fall short is due to the lack of a solid and flexible accounting foundation. They use single-entry accounting where they assign categories to a list of transactions. This would work only for very simple use cases, like when you have one bank account and simple transactions that fall apart when tracking the complex modern financial life.

That is why we're building PaperMoney, a brand-new new personal-finance app based on double-entry counting. In double-entry counting, everything is an account. Your bank account is an account, your credit card is an account, your coffee is an account, and your rent is an account. Every transaction is a transfer between two accounts. This makes it much more flexible, powerful and accurate than the existing apps. Let's see how PaperMoney doesn't suck.

PaperMoney is decent

Decency is our first core principle. Whatever decisions we make, we take it through the lens of whether a decent app would do this.

• Would a decent app sell your data? No.
• Would a decent app break while you use it? No.

PaperMoney is correct and stable

We invest heavily in engineering to make sure that your bank account connections are secure, correct and stable. We use multiple providers and run periodic checks to make sure all connections are running smoothly. We also use multiple streams of data(sms and email parsing, csv imports).

PaperMoney is based on solid principles

Our foundations are based on double-entry accounting. This enables us to properly model the flow of money even for very complex transactions and get an accurate view of your net worth, assets, liabilities, expenses and income.

PaperMoney is flexible

Since we are built on flexible primitives you can manually track scenario you want. Let's say we don't support splitting transactions, you can just create a couple of accounts under the Split name and move money between these accounts. You have access to the core data model.

PaperMoney is smart

Because of double entry we have far richer contexts about each transaction, which allows us to build better intelligence systems for automatic transaction tagging, personal finance planning, and advice on how to reach your financial goals faster.

We know these are tall claims to make, and it's going to take significant amount of effort to build something so much better than what exists today. But we're up for the challenge. We believe we can build something radically different and far better than what exists today. If you are as excited as we are, download the app and give it a try. We are in our earliest enter everything manually stage.