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Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2025)

261 points david927 | 2 comments | 23 Feb 25 23:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.442s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?
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azuanrb ◴[24 Feb 25 08:18 UTC] No.43156995[source]▶
In my country (Malaysia), most banks only export bank and credit card statements as PDFs, with no standard format for displaying the data. Since most of my transactions are cashless, I want a way to track my spending habits. I don't want to manually key in each transaction, so apps that require that won’t work for me.

Right now, I'm building a bank statement PDF converter to track my past spending. I’m about halfway there, with a semi-automated way to categorize transactions too. So far, it’s working great!

replies(1): >>43157060 #
monroewalker ◴[24 Feb 25 08:27 UTC] No.43157060[source]▶
Do the banks offer email notifications for transactions? That could be another approach if you automate pulling info from the emails
replies(1): >>43157542 #
1. azuanrb ◴[24 Feb 25 09:35 UTC] No.43157542[source]▶
For individual transactions, it's not really reliable, unfortunately. But for monthly reporting, they do have it, so that could be the next step. There's an app here that does something similar, but it doesn’t seem to be actively developed anymore. It’s a free app, so I guess there’s no reason for them to keep investing in it. Fair enough. Looks like they’re shifting toward a B2B solution instead, so that might be my next direction too.

That said, my main goal for now is just to make it work for personal B2C use first. I do think there’s some potential here because major cities are pretty much cashless now, and there aren’t any good existing solutions for B2C.

There are some other decent options, but they mainly focus on B2B (that’s where the money is), so they’re quite expensive and overkill for what I need.

replies(1): >>43157897 #
2. masteruvpuppetz ◴[24 Feb 25 10:21 UTC] No.43157897[source]▶
I was wondering about building a payment SMS notification -> Tracking app.

It would be more real-time and give me heartaches everytime I go out of budget :D:D:D