荔枝记账

Hi everyone,

I'm thrilled to announce that my bookkeeping app, Lychee Bookkeeping, is now live! Website: https://lychee.ideahub.fun/

I've seen many fellow indie developers build bookkeeping tools, which are considered one of the three must-haves for independent creators. But I decided to make my own because even though my income was decent, I had no clue how much my household spent each month or where the money went.

When I looked for existing bookkeeping apps, I found none solved a key pain point: manual bookkeeping. It's 2023, the internet has been around for 30 years, and we still have to enter data manually or import statements by hand? That's not efficient at all.

So I built Lychee Bookkeeping, which currently has 3 core features:

1. Automatic bookkeeping Life is short, your time should be spent on more meaningful things. You don't need to handle bookkeeping yourself. Just forward your China Merchants Bank credit card statements to Lychee Bookkeeping's dedicated email, and that's it. Since there are no public APIs for bank, Alipay or WeChat Pay statements right now, this is the safest and most convenient solution I could come up with.
2. Monthly spending limit This isn't a hard limit, but a friendly reminder. Set your maximum monthly spending amount in Lychee, and you'll get alerts when your spending hits 50% and 80% of that cap, to help you keep your expenses in check.
3. Large transaction limit Again, this is a reminder, not a restriction. Impulse is the devil, and impulse spending is the worst of them all. Research (my own personal research, of course) shows impulse spending is a major reason many people live beyond their means. Set a maximum amount for a single transaction in Lychee, and you'll get an alert if you make a purchase over that amount, to help you avoid rash decisions. Plus, there's a fun little easter egg feature: the Wealth Index. It analyzes your monthly spending to calculate how well-off you are that month — the higher the score, the more financially comfortable you are. This feature always gives me a little comfort, turns out I'm not as broke as I thought.

That's all for the intro, let's take a look at what the app looks like below. 【Software screenshots as shown above】

The feature set is small and the interface isn't perfect, so please bear with me. If you're a China Merchants Bank credit card user interested in trying it out, feel free to give it a go. We also welcome any suggestions for improvement!