Ledger — Personal Finance Dashboard

A full-stack personal finance platform that connects to a real bank via Plaid Production, normalizes and enriches transactions through a custom TypeScript pipeline, and surfaces actionable financial intelligence — budgets, subscription detection, a 7-detector alerts engine, goals, and a composite 0–100 Financial Health Score.

🔗 Live demo — no login required · Explore the full dashboard instantly with realistic sample data — no sign-up. Or sign in with Clerk to connect a real bank.

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Overview

I built Ledger to learn how a modern fintech stack fits together end-to-end — bank API integration, encryption at rest, transaction normalization, recurring detection, alerting, goal tracking — while delivering something I actually use daily.

The app pulls live transactions from my Wells Fargo accounts through Plaid Production, runs them through a TypeScript cleaning pipeline (regex + alias map + pending-resolver), stores them in PostgreSQL via Prisma, and renders a polished React dashboard with seven alert detectors, subscription-price-change detection, and a weighted financial health score. A node-cron job re-syncs daily at 06:00 UTC and snapshots account balances for net-worth trending.

Built incrementally across 5 phases, ~6 months, 71+ commits.

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Screenshots

Hero Overview	Spending Donut	Net Worth Trend

Subscriptions	Smart Alerts	Goals + Health Score

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Features

Banking & sync

• Plaid Production integration with Wells Fargo — /transactions/sync and cached balances from /accounts/get; Recurring Transactions is enabled, and no page load calls it
• Daily cron sync via node-cron — runs at 06:00 UTC, syncs transactions, snapshots balances
• Cursor pagination on transactions — handles unbounded history without re-fetching
• Incremental updates only — persisted Plaid sync cursor per item
• Balances: one source. Every balance in the app is Plaid's cached balance from /accounts/get, as of the Item's last successful update — about once a day for Items with Transactions. Real-time /accounts/balance/get is a separately authorised, paid product this client doesn't have; sync used to call it and get INVALID_PRODUCT every time, then fall back. Real-time Balance is a possible M7.5 addition if cached balances prove too stale for utilization advice.

Intelligence

• 7-detector Smart Alerts engine — large transactions, new merchants, monthly pace, budget exceeded, low balance, missed paycheck, subscription price-up
• Subscriptions & Bills from Plaid's recurring streams (stored, refreshed by webhook, a daily backstop and the Sync button past a 10-minute cooldown, never on page load), sorted by one definition into Subscriptions, Bills and Suggested, with Confirm, Dismiss and "Mark as a subscription/bill" (docs/m7.6-audit.md)
• Composite Financial Health Score (0–100) weighted across savings rate, spend control, debt load, growth trend
• Goal tracking — 4 types (savings, emergency fund, vacation/purchase, debt payoff)
• Monthly insights — summary, runway, top merchants, largest purchases
• Projected-overspend warnings — budgets warn you before you blow the limit, not after

UX

• Installable PWA (iOS + Android home screen)
• Mobile-responsive down to 375px
• Skeleton loaders — no spinner jank
• Design token system + unified chart theme (single source of truth for colors, sizes, motion)
• Empty-state copy hand-tuned for every state

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This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗