Personal Project · 2026
Family Finance Tool
Marriage is a financial merger with no manual, so I pieced one together.
The problem
Money management is deeply personal, tied up in our values and what we're building toward. Getting married merges two systems and habits that don't always scale, with no generic playbook for how to combine them.
Day to day, that means money moving through multiple cards, accounts, and Venmo, tangled up with reimbursements and shared and individual spending. Enough moving pieces in different places, and the overwhelm begins. Then the real costs show up: money slips between accounts unnoticed, debt builds quietly, and decisions get avoided because the conversation feels too hard to start.
The bet
Automating accounting frees up energy for my family to actually pay attention to where the money is going and feel on top of our finances. I'd already hand-reconciled the books in Excel and QuickBooks at Baleena, so I already knew what freeing up that time and attention could do.
What I built
A local pipeline, built with Codex, that ingests raw exports and produces one normalized review workbook. A few of the harder problems it solves:
- Venmo enrichment. Venmo shows up in bank exports as a generic transfer. The pipeline matches those rows against actual Venmo activity to recover the real counterparty and memo, so a payment reads as “dinner with a friend” instead of “transfer,” and a cashout doesn't get double-counted against the payment that funded it.
- Transfers vs. spending. Internal transfers and credit card payments are detected and excluded from spending totals, so moving money among personal accounts doesn't look like an expense.
- Refunds that offset, not inflate. A refund reduces the category it came from instead of showing up as unrelated income.
Output is one workbook: transaction detail, Venmo match detail, reconciliation, and income/spending/cash-flow summaries.
Malleable software
Categorizing spending, reconciling Venmo, and splitting money between family and individual accounts: there's no one right way to do any of it. I tried a few budgeting apps and got frustrated with their generic categories and workflow. But building a workbook from scratch felt tedious and overwhelming too: copying and pasting spreadsheets, writing formulas, and figuring out the process on top of that. AI helped me build something customized to how we work without ever needing to write a formula. And friends and family can use the codebase as a template and swap in their own categories and split rules.
Decisions I made on purpose
Flag, don't guess. Anything the pipeline isn't confident about gets a review flag.
One workbook, not a dashboard. Everything the family needs to make a decision lives in one file, no login required.
Local, not cloud. Bank and Venmo exports are sensitive; the pipeline runs on my machine instead of handing that data to a third-party service.
Why it mattered
A note from a financial-planning workshop has stuck with me since: treat your finances like a life-design problem, not an optimization problem. It's not only about shaving minutes off accounting and reconciliation, but about paying attention together, catching problems while they're still small, and deciding what we want the money to do instead of just tracking where it went.