Money templates

Small money software, and why it is a category of its own

There is a wide gap between accounting and a shoebox of receipts, and most household money lives in it. Splitting the cost of a life with somebody whose bank account is not yours. Keeping a savings goal honest. Knowing what the last four months of the electricity bill actually looked like. Tracking who paid for the shared holiday house and by how much everyone is out of pocket.

None of that is bookkeeping. It is arithmetic plus memory, and the reason it goes wrong is almost never the arithmetic. It goes wrong because the record is incomplete, or because two people are each keeping a different one, or because nobody wants to be the person who brings it up.

The jobs inside it

Splitting shared costs is the classic: two people, one household, separate accounts, and an ongoing question about who is up. Bill tracking is the next: not paying bills, which your bank does, but knowing what is due, what moved, and what is quietly creeping up year on year. Then there is goal tracking, where the number matters less than seeing it move, and category budgets, where the useful part is not the limit but noticing you spent three times more on takeaways in January than you thought.

Further out sit the specific ones: a ledger for a shared holiday house across four families, a tally of what you are owed by a landlord, a record of the cash side of a small side business, a running total of what a renovation has cost so far against what you said it would.

The spreadsheet is not wrong, it is just alone

Almost everybody starts with a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet is genuinely the right tool for the arithmetic. Its problem is social. It has one real author, it is unpleasant on a phone, and the other person in the household has never opened it and never will. So the shared record becomes one person's record, which is the exact failure the whole exercise was meant to prevent.

The alternative most people try is a splitting app. Those work well for the narrow case they were built for, usually a holiday among friends, and then stop: the categories are theirs, the currency handling is theirs, the notion of a household is theirs, and there is no room for the fact that your household treats the baby budget separately or that one of you is paid monthly and the other quarterly. Subscription pricing for that trade is a poor deal, and the export, if there is one, is a CSV you will never reimport.

What an AI-built money app does differently

The first difference is that logging stops being a form. You say you paid eighty four euros for the weekly shop split with your partner and the row appears with the category already right, which matters because the whole thing collapses the moment logging feels like admin.

The second is that the app can be shaped like your money rather than like the average person's. Your categories, your definition of shared, your rules about what gets split and what does not. The third is that it will tell you things a form cannot: that rent is normally logged by the first and has not been this month, or that the number you keep quoting for the renovation stopped being true in February.

What it does not do is touch your bank. Nothing here imports statements or moves money, which is a real limitation and also the reason there is no account to link, no credentials to hand over and no read access to your finances to regret later.

Start with the ledger

Household Ledger is the fully worked example: expenses with a payer and a split, six categories, live balances for everyone, and a settle-up step that nets the whole household out and proposes the fewest real transfers rather than one payment per pair. Settlements are append only because they are financial history; expenses stay editable because people mistype amounts. If your money is entangled with the rest of running a home, the Chore Board sits next to it in household templates.

If you need something the ledger is not, say a savings goal or a per-project renovation budget, describe it to your AI and have it build that instead. Installing anything here needs a Homespun account, and what you install is private to you and the people you invite.

The honest version of what you are trusting

Money records deserve a plainer answer than most software gives, so here it is. An installed app is private by default: only you and the people you invite by email can open it. That is enforced, not a setting somebody might have got wrong. It is not, however, encrypted such that only you can read it. The rows sit in a database on Homespun's servers, and the operator could technically read them, exactly as with any hosted product that is not explicitly end to end encrypted.

What you are not handing over is any access to your actual money. There is no bank connection to authorise, no open banking consent to renew, no card on file and no read-only credential that outlives your interest in the app. The blast radius of a household ledger is the household ledger.

On scale, the ceilings are far above household use and worth knowing anyway: an app holds up to a hundred thousand rows and a gigabyte of data, and an account can hold a hundred apps. On getting your data out, be clear-eyed: there is no one-click CSV export. Your AI can read every row back through the same interface it writes them with, and the command line tool prints them as JSON, but if a spreadsheet download is a requirement, that is a gap today.