Stop typing your expenses

Every expense tracker dies the same death.

Week one, you log everything. You pick categories with care. You feel organized, maybe even a little smug. Week three, you skip a coffee because you are in a hurry. Week four, you have eleven untracked receipts in a jacket pocket and a vague sense of guilt. Week six, the app is in a folder called "Utilities" and you never open it again.

The app did not fail you. The data-entry model did.

Manual entry is the bug

Think about what logging one expense actually asks of you. Open the app. Tap "new transaction." Type the amount. Type the merchant. Pick a category from a list you half remember. Pick the date, because you are logging it two days late. Save. Repeat, for every coffee, every grocery run, every split dinner.

That is 30 to 60 seconds of friction, dozens of times a week, forever. No habit survives that. Not because people are lazy, but because the cost is charged at the worst possible moment — when you are walking out of a shop with your hands full — and the reward (a tidy report at the end of the month) is weeks away.

Bank sync was the industry's first answer: skip the entry entirely, let the bank feed do it. It works — if your bank is supported, if the aggregator stays connected, if you live in a country the aggregator covers, and if you are comfortable handing over your credentials. And even then, the feed gives you AMZN MKTP US*2K4XJ9 three days later, with no idea what you bought or which budget it belongs to. You traded typing for cleanup.

We think there is a better trade.

Capture, don't enter

moniya replaces the form with two capture paths.

Snap the receipt. Point your camera at it — any receipt, in any language. A crumpled konbini receipt from Tokyo, a handwritten café bill from Lisbon, a thermal-paper monster from a US supermarket. moniya reads the merchant, the line items, the date, and the currency, then drafts the transaction. The original text is kept alongside the translation: ローソン 渋谷店 stays on the record next to "Lawson Shibuya," so your ledger matches the paper in your hand.

Or just say it. "Twelve fifty for lunch at the ramen place near the office." That sentence contains an amount, a category hint, and a merchant. moniya hears it, parses it, and drafts the transaction — amount, merchant, category, date — while you keep walking.

Either way, the interaction takes a few seconds, at the moment the expense happens, with the thing you already have in your hand. That is the entire pitch: the cost of logging drops below the threshold where habits break.

The draft is not the transaction

Here is the part we refuse to compromise on: nothing posts without your approval.

Every capture — scan or voice — lands as a draft. You see what the AI extracted: the merchant, the items, the amount, the currency, the suggested category. If it is right (and it usually is), one tap approves it. If the category is wrong, you fix it in the draft, before it ever touches your ledger.

This sounds like a small design choice. It is actually the whole philosophy.

Money tools that write to your ledger without asking accumulate silent errors. A miscategorized transaction here, a duplicate there, a subscription filed under "Shopping" — and after three months you no longer trust your own reports, which means you stop looking at them, which means the tool is dead. Trust is the product. A ledger you don't trust is just a list of numbers.

Review-before-post keeps the error rate where you can see it: at zero entries you didn't personally wave through. The AI does the tedious part — the reading, the typing, the translating, the currency math. You do the one-second judgment call. That division of labor is the only one that works.

What the AI actually handles

A few things the capture pipeline deals with so you never have to:

• Language. Receipts are read in the language they were printed in. You get an English draft with the original preserved — useful when you need to match a record against the paper months later.
• Currency. Buy something in yen, track it in dollars — or the other way around. The amount is kept in its original currency, and the exchange rate is frozen at the moment of spending, so your history never drifts when rates move. (We wrote a whole post on why rates get frozen.)
• Line items. Not just "Supermarket, $84.12" but what was actually in the basket. Good luck getting that from a bank feed.
• Context from speech. "Split the taxi with Dana, my half was nine euros" is a real sentence the voice capture is built for.

The honest limits

Two things worth stating plainly.

First, moniya does not connect to your bank — by design, not as a missing feature. AI capture works in any country, with any bank, with cash, and without handing credentials to an aggregator. If bank sync is the one feature you cannot live without, we are the wrong tool, and that is fine.

Second, the free plan includes 50 AI captures a month, and the core — unlimited accounts and transactions, budgets, saving goals, recurring bills, reports, net worth, CSV export — is free forever. Fifty captures covers a normal month of scans and voice memos for most people; Pro removes the ceiling and adds AI insights on your reports. Either way, your data exports to CSV anytime. It is your ledger, not ours.

Six weeks from now

The test of an expense tracker is not week one. It is week six, when the novelty is gone and the only thing keeping the habit alive is how little it costs you.

A photo. A sentence. A tap to approve. That is the whole loop, on web, iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows — the same account everywhere, so the capture happens on your phone and the review can happen at your desk.

Stop typing your expenses. You were never going to keep it up anyway — and now you don't have to.