Why I built this.

Budtik started as a spreadsheet for two people.

My wife and I share a home, a joint account and a baby. Between the three of them, most of what we spend is spent together — and for a while we kept track of it the way most people do, which is to say in a shared sheet neither of us wanted to open.

The apps we tried were busier rather than better. Charts we hadn’t asked for, categories we didn’t use, a colour scheme that treated a normal week’s groceries as a small emergency. None of them answered the question we actually had, which was never “where did the money go” but how much is left.

So I built the answer instead, and we’ve used it since.

Three things it does differently

The split is settled in advance. We each move an agreed amount into the joint account at the start of the month and the household spends from there. There’s no working out who owes what in the last week of the month, because the fairness was decided when we agreed the budget.

The receipt does the typing. A weekly shop is nappies and dinner and washing powder, and calling all of it “groceries” is how a budget stops meaning anything. Budtik reads the photo, splits the shop across the categories it belongs to, and shows me the lines before it saves a single one. It gets it right nearly every time, and nearly is exactly why it always asks.

It hasn’t got an opinion about you. There’s no green for a good week and no red for a bad one. Going over is worth knowing and it says so plainly, once, and then stops. Nothing celebrates, nothing nags, nothing keeps a streak you can break.

What happens next

I built it for one household, and it has been quietly running one for a while now. I’m opening it to a few more at a time — slowly, because the thing that makes it good is that it does a small number of things properly for two people who share their money.

If that’s your household too, leave your address and I’ll write when there’s room.

— Ayo