Automating Household Finances: From Spreadsheets to an API-Driven Dashboard

Role

UX Strategy, Research, and Design

Year

2026

Type

Personal Project

My wife and I share household expenses without sharing a bank account. For years, we spent an hour each week recording and going over expenses in an excel sheet, writing excel formula to do basic things like "spend by category".

Challenge

Each week, we would set out 2 hours to update an Excel sheet with our weekly finances. But, we mostly missed doing it or hated doing it because of the tedious nature of data-entry.

Solution

I built a tool that shows our expenses using apis and csv uploads from our banks - it categorises them and splits every transaction based on a 2 years of trained data.

1 click

Instead of manual data-entry

2 hours

Saved each week

Process Details

UX Research

We use Up Bank, NAB, and Westpac for income, expenses, savings, and loans. Each bank has an API or a workaround to centralise financial data in one app.

Looking at our Excel sheet, I had access to 2 years worth of training data for the app to be able to build detailed rules.

Here's how I brought the research together:

I compiled the Excel sheets as training data
Defined the database behaviour using Supabase
Used Claude to define the PRD and data flow from banks to the app
Used documentation from the 3 banks to define data governance practices

My wife and I defined what the app should and shouldn't do. We also defined the repeating pain points in the current workflow so that the finance app wouldn't just be another excel sheet we had to manually keep updated.

Conclusion

We save hours each month not recording expenses/earnings. That's mostly automated or done by us while looking at spending habits or worrying about future money needed for future goals. We understand where our money is going each month and how much we need to save for future expenses. But saving time isn't enough. I'm not good at money-ing yet.

Next: from filing to being fuel-conscious

I don't understand our finances in a way that helps me be more capable in growing money (without losing my soul). The next iteration will help me get better at money-ing in a measurable way - quant, qual et all.