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Comments (82)

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  Fiveplus
  This feels like the peak of resume driven development. The maker of this has taken a deterministic problem (substring matching transaction descriptions) that could be solved with a 50-line Python script or a standard .rules file and injected a non-deterministic, token-burning probability engine into the middle of it. I'll stick to hledger and a regex file. At least I know my grocery budget won't hallucinate into "Consulting Expenses" because the temperature was set too high.
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  weitendorf
  Consumer AI product posted on a weekend during prime European hours. Brace yourselves!Actually I would consider this setup to not be very user friendly. This makes a lot of assumptions about the data/format you have available already. Personally I would assume that anything operating on my bank transactions would be through some more turnkey/handsoff integration rather than a direct import.Puzzle basically does this by hooking directly into my bank and gives me other tools where I can easily use the categorizations
• pdyc
  whats up with negativity? its a nice tool, code is opensourced here https://github.com/davidfowl/tally and while the argument of deterministic solution is valid, ai is more suitable for this task as task itself is ill defined and deterministic solution wont be able to cover all cases.
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  codegladiator
  Why does LLM generated websites feel so "LLM generated".Its like a bootstrap css just dropped. People still giving "minimum effort" into their vibe code/eng projects but slap a domain on top. Is this to save token cost ?
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  fazza999
  Old, retired developer here. I'm interested in tally for my use-case but don't want to spend any money or little money on the AI. What are my free cheap AI options?
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  jstrebel
  Hmm, no, I don't think I want to tell OpenAI my banking details and transactions. (sorry, Google and Microsoft, you need to stay out, too)
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  ChicagoDave
  I just went through this with my app https://ledga.us/ starting with merchant codes and my own custom rules. It catches national entities, but local ones usually fall through the cracks. You really don’t need AI, but it is pretty.
• nico
  Some friends built a whole company around this problem, it’s actually pretty difficult to resolve, with lots of edge cases, especially if you are handling multiple banks and lots of customers with slightly different needsThis tools looks pretty nice, kudos for building it and putting it out there for others to try it
• librasteve
  I wrote this in Raku… sorry in a private repo since just for personal use.I tried to use LLM::Function for category matching and, in my brief excursion that way found that submitting bank description strings to LLMs is pretty much the antithesis of what they are good at.My solution does regex, then L-D lexical distance, then opens the Raku repl for manual fixes…<<Catmap run tries to do an exact match to the description and auto apply a category. Failing that, it does a levenshtein / damarau lexical distance and proposes a best match category, prompting for [CR]. Or you can override and assign to an existing category. Go cats at the prompt to get a list of active categories.>>
• dominicm
  Youch. I knew the rates of people criticizing-by-headline could be bad, but this one is rough.Y'all, please actually read the homepage before dunking on someone's project...
• cadamsdotcom
  Or:> claude“There’s a CSV at @path please open it and classify my bank transactions”.
• siscia
  This is not an AI tool, this is a CLI that has very verbose output and documentation.It can be used by human or by AI agents.I experiment the same with other mechanisms, and CLI are as effective - if not more effective - than MCP.Granted, having access to AI I would use AI to run it. But nothing is stopping a manual, human centric, use.I believe more tools should be written like that.
• stared
  I wanted to create a similar tool. Then turned out that Claude Code is all I need, both for crunching data (even though export had issues) and visualizating it. And it was bach when Sonnet 4 was the strongest model.
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  factorialboy
  Wasn't there an accounting software back in the 90s and early 2000s that had the same name?
• redhale
  Looks cool! I don't understand the negativity here. If you really think a general Python script can be easily written to solve this problem, I invite you to actually try and write that script.I actually just vibed a hyper-specific version of a similar tool for myself a couple weeks ago, mostly just for fun to see if I (or Claude) could. Took about an hour, and it's now able to automate the spreadsheet process my girlfriend and I use each month to split certain expenses. Saves us each ~15 minutes weekly.I'm loving the ability LLMs provide to both build personal software so rapidly, as well as solve these kinds of fuzzier natural language problem spaces so relatively easily.Side note: the state of consumer transaction reporting is absolute garbage. There should really be more metadata mandated by consumer protection regs or something. The fact that this is a hard problem in the first place feels very dumb.
• mrbluecoat
  Without ERP integration, it's a home-use project.
• jgalt212
  Adjacent: Our biz uses Quickbooks, and while I'm not a fan in general, its pattern matcher does a pretty good job of matching credit card transactions to expense categories and accounts.I have no idea what the deterministic / probabilistic mix is under the hood.
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  villgax
  You could have picked any other name instead of 20yr old software company doing invoices lol
• boris_be
  Really cool!
• dartharva
  The original namesake Tally[0] is a very long-running ERP and accounting software (started in 1986!) used by thousands of businesses around the world.[0] https://tallysolutions.com/tally-prime/
• delulustream
  [dead]
• qotgalaxy
  [dead]