Story

The Problem

After leaving my stable employment to become a contractor, I quickly started running into issues with keeping up with my finances. As a first-time business owner, I was simply overwhelmed with the amount of work I had to do.

Fast forward years later, I am now efficient at it, but I still hate it. Multiple clients, invoices, bank accounts, currencies - stuff was piling up and getting out of hand.

I've been using some "industry standard" tools, but they were scattered across multiple websites and apps. Not good.

The cherry on top was that every month, I'd forget to send something important to my accountant, or even worse, I'd forget to pay an invoice.

Something had to change, and fast.

I started experimenting with a few different options, and here's what I came up with.

Approach 1: n8n Automation (Late 2023)

I built a n8n automation to parse out invoices, data, and auto-categorize them into the right folder, by income/expense. Then the problem of manual uploads arose, so I quickly spun up a form to allow me to upload the invoices manually and pass them into the automation.

This worked very well, until a friend of mine, who is a freelancer as well, asked me if he could use it.

No problem, I just duplicated the automation, set it up for them with new credentials and they were good to go.

Then, I thought, why not make it a standalone app? There's surely more people out there that could benefit from this.

Thus, Expensicat was born.

Approach 2: A CLI solution (Early 2024)

I've quickly rebuilt the system from scratch, using a CLI tool to parse the invoices, data, and auto-categorize them into the right folder, by income/expense.

Again, this worked very well, and the setup was quite straightforward - for me though, and only for me. As an engineer at heart I suffered from what I call "developer ux", where it worked very well for me, but not for others.

But, third time's the charm, right?

Approach 3: A Web App (Mid 2024)

With the ever-evolving power of large language models, around mid 2024, I started building a web-app with a nice, easy to use and intuitive UI.

This turned out to be more complex than expected, there were plenty of things I needed

• Parsing of receipts, invoices - both from the web as well as auto-importing them from an email (+ having a custom "financial" inbox)
• Creating reports for my accountant (transactions)
• Matching the different transactions to the right invoice or receipt (reconciliation)
• Exporting all receipts on a monthly basis
• Tracking time with different clients, projects, the occasional subcontractor (for design work)
• Being able to manage these reports after they've been created

Update 13/7/25:

• I've been now internally using it for the last 7 months while rolling out constant improvements, it's now live at expensicat.com

What we want to achieve

We want to be your financial copilot.

Humans are good at being creative, doing new exciting things, but business, well - it hasn't changed much in the last century. Bookkeeping is, unfortunately, a necessary evil, so why not make it easier for you?

If this resonates with you, we'd love to have you on board, visit expensicat.com to try it out.

Update 13/7/25:

• Expensicat is now live, go to expensicat.com to try it out. We'd love to hear your feedback!