Tally — Personal Expense Tracker

Tally is a personal project designed to make expense tracking simple and private. Add expenses manually, snap a photo of a receipt, or just describe it out loud. Create an account to use it.

Features

• Manual entry, receipt scanning & voice entry — enter expenses/income manually (date, amount, merchant, category, notes), snap a photo of a receipt, or tap the mic and describe it out loud; Google Gemini extracts the fields and pre-fills the form for you to review. Drop multiple receipt photos at once to batch-scan them.
• Automatic receipt import from Photos — create a personal access token in Settings > Automatic import, then set up an iOS Shortcut (fully automatic, or a one-tap Share Sheet variant) or the Android share sheet to log receipts without ever opening the app; auto-imported transactions are tagged auto-import and keep the source photo attached so you can spot-check them.
• Wallets — track balances across multiple cash/bank/e-wallet pools, transfer between them (with real currency conversion), set a default, archive old ones, share one with a friend, and give any wallet a payment-card look (network badge, chip, holder name, last 4, expiry) with per-field show/hide toggles and a drag-to-reorder stack.
• Wallet passes & membership cards — digital loyalty cards, coupons, event tickets, boarding passes, gift cards, and transit passes with a QR/barcode/PDF417/Aztec code, custom-named fields, and an attachable logo/banner (with a pan-pinch-zoom crop tool); pick a look from a gallery of admin-reviewed premade pass designs, or submit your own.
• Folders — group wallets/cards and passes into named, colored folders on the Wallet page (two independent groupings — a card folder and a pass folder are never mixed).
• Recurring transactions — rent, subscriptions, salary logged automatically on a weekly/monthly/yearly schedule; editable, pausable, reorderable, and skippable for a single upcoming occurrence.
• Budgets — a monthly spending limit per category, an Analytics progress section, optional rollover of unused budget into the next month, and a dismissible alert banner when a category nears or goes over its limit.
• Savings goals — track progress toward something you're saving for, with manual contribute/withdraw and an Analytics progress section.
• Debt & loan tracker — track money lent or borrowed, with an optional manual payoff schedule and push/in-app notifications for upcoming payments.
• Split transactions — log one receipt as multiple category lines (shown as a single grouped card in Activities), or share a public, read-only link so anyone can see what they owe without a Tally account.
• A rich, customizable Analytics page — spending trends, category breakdowns, net worth & wallet trends, budget/goal health, and forward-looking end-of-month projections, plus a merchant spend leaderboard, spending-by-day-of-week, biggest single transactions, a savings-rate stat, and a category-movers list showing what changed since the last period — all driven by one shared period selector (This month / Last month / Last 3 months / Last 6 months / Year to date), with a "Customize" menu to show/hide any individual section.
• In-app notification center & desktop command palette — a bell icon surfaces recurring/budget/loan alerts as they happen (regardless of your email/push settings); on desktop, press Ctrl/Cmd+K for a fuzzy-searchable command palette, or use global shortcuts (G then a letter to jump between pages, C to add a transaction, ? to see the full list — also browsable at Settings > Keyboard shortcuts).
• In-app AI assistant & tools — ask the spending assistant questions like "how much did I spend on food this month" and get an answer computed from your real transactions; plus a standalone QR/barcode code generator and scanner, currency converter, and discount/tip and loan calculators (Settings > Tools).
• Search, filter & bulk actions — search by merchant/notes/tags; filter by type, category, tags, wallet, or date range; bulk-select transactions in Activities to delete or tag them at once; swipe a transaction left/right on mobile for quick delete/share.
• Free-form tags, customizable categories & a vendor directory — label transactions with custom tags, rename/recolor/add an icon to categories, and manage every merchant you've ever paid (Settings > Vendors) — sortable by spend/recency/usage, with one-tap merge for inconsistently-spelled entries.
• CSV export & import — for transactions, budgets, recurring rules, and savings goals; import accepts common column-name synonyms and infers expense vs. income from the amount's sign.
• Currency selection & automatic conversion — pick your default currency in Settings; optionally auto-convert amounts detected in a different currency (via Frankfurter, a free ECB-rate API) when scanning, speaking, or viewing Analytics.
• Installable, offline-capable PWA — install Tally to your home screen; it works offline with a sync queue for anything you add or edit without a connection, and can be locked behind a passcode or Face ID/Touch ID/Windows Hello.
• Email & in-app notifications — opt in (Settings > Permissions) to an email when a recurring rule auto-logs a transaction or a category goes over budget; the in-app notification center picks up the same events (plus loan reminders) regardless of that opt-in.
• Encrypted backup — a passphrase-protected full-data export/import (Settings > Backup), encrypted client-side so the passphrase never reaches the server.
• Multi-user accounts, fully isolated — anyone can sign up with their own username and password, or sign in with GitHub (and link/unlink GitHub from an existing account in Settings > Account); each account's data is fully private via signed, httpOnly session cookies. Self-service password reset by email, account deletion, and "sign out of all devices" are all available from Settings.
• Modern and Classic designs — a clean, flat Modern look by default, built for quick entry on a phone and full desktop use, with the original green liquid-glass design one tap away in Settings > Design.
• Postgres storage — works out of the box with Vercel's Neon database (free tier available).

Screenshots

The Dashboard screenshots that used to open this section showed a widget-grid page that has since been replaced by the fixed Analytics page (see the changelog) — they've been removed rather than left up as an inaccurate first impression. The galleries below (Activities, Settings) still reflect the current app; try the live demo for a look at Analytics, Wallet folders, and everything else added since.

Adding a transaction — manual entry, receipt scanning, or voice entry, all from the same modal.

Activities — search, filter, and manage every transaction; desktop gets a two-pane master-detail layout, mobile keeps a focused full-width list with swipe actions.

Settings — every account, wallet, budget, and customization option in one place; desktop shows the list and the active panel side by side.

Known limitations

• Requires Gemini API key: Receipt scanning and voice transcription require a free API key from Google AI Studio. Manual entry and CSV export work without it.
• Requires Postgres database: The app stores all data in Postgres (not SQLite). Free tier available via Vercel (uses Neon), or Railway.
• Requires a Resend API key for email: Password reset emails and the optional recurring/budget notification emails need a free Resend API key. Everything else works without it.
• No true background photo-monitoring on iOS/Android: automatic receipt import relies on OS-level automation (iOS Shortcuts, Android's share sheet) rather than the app silently watching your photo library — see the in-app setup guide in Settings > Automatic import.

Security notes

• API authentication: All API routes (/api/*) require a valid session token and are protected by middleware. Unauthenticated requests return 401 Unauthorized.
• Multi-user accounts, fully isolated: Anyone can create an account at /register (username + password, no email). Every account's expenses, categories, and balance are scoped to that account only — no other account can see or modify them.
• Password storage: Passwords are hashed with scrypt (a slow, salted hashing algorithm) before being stored — the plaintext password is never saved anywhere.
• Session security: Sessions are signed with HMAC-SHA256 (a mathematical lock that proves no one tampered with your login badge) using SESSION_SECRET, stored in httpOnly cookies (locked away where hackers can't access them), and expire after 30 days. Session cookies are marked Secure (only works on encrypted websites) and SameSite=Lax (protects against tricks) in production.
• HTTPS required: Always deploy on HTTPS in production. Session cookies include the Secure flag and will not work over plain HTTP.
• Environment variables: Store SESSION_SECRET (and ADMIN_BOOTSTRAP_PASSWORD, if used) securely in your hosting platform's environment variable settings (Vercel, Railway, etc.), not in code. Never commit .env.local.
• Rotate secrets: If you suspect SESSION_SECRET has leaked, rotate it immediately — this invalidates all existing sessions for every account, logging everyone out.

See Acknowledgments for the author, tech stack, and icon credits.