Budget Connect
LivePersonal finance that keeps up with real life
A personal and household finance app — connected accounts, budgets that survive contact with reality, savings pots, bills, and a forecast of what is actually left.
The problem
Most budgeting apps fail at the same point: the moment the plan meets the month.
They will happily tell you that you have money left, while quietly ignoring that rent leaves on Friday, the car insurance is annual and due next week, and half of the balance is really your share of a bill someone else has already paid. The number is accurate and completely useless.
The other failure is effort. A budget that needs twenty minutes of manual data entry a week is a budget you will keep for about three weeks.
What Budget Connect does
Accounts connect to your bank and pull transactions in automatically. Rules categorise them as they arrive, so the routine spending files itself and only the unusual things need attention. Transactions can be split across categories, and receipts attached where a total alone will not mean anything in six months.
Photograph a receipt and it is read for you — the merchant, the total, and the date come back filled in, ready to become a transaction. It is the single biggest saving of the tedium that kills budgets.
Budgets are set per category and tracked against what actually happened. Bills and scheduled transfers are known in advance, so committed money is subtracted before you decide something is spare — which is the difference between a balance and an answer.
Savings pots carve money aside for specific goals without needing another account, and the balance projection carries everything forward so you can see what a decision does before you make it. The simulator exists for exactly that question: if this changes, what happens?
For households, the whole thing can be shared, including settling up between people — because most money problems in a house are really accounting problems between two people who both paid for things.
How it is built
Laravel 13, Livewire, and MySQL, installable as a mobile app with web push notifications. Bank feeds come in through Plaid and SimpleFIN, receipts are read with Google Gemini, email goes out through Resend, sign-in is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile, and attachments are stored on Google Cloud Storage.