About FinPlanner

Why I built it

Every budgeting app I tried assumed my bank would tell it where my money went. Mine doesn’t. A Central Bank statement caps the narration at about fifty characters and spends most of them on the payment rail — the IMPS reference, the UPI handle, the switch code — leaving almost nothing to identify the shop. Import that and a large share of your spending lands in a category called Other, which tells you nothing except that you spent it.

FinPlanner is my attempt to make a budget that survives contact with those statements. It’s a personal project, built and maintained by one person, in the open about what it can and can’t do.

What it actually does

• Reads your statements. PDF, CSV and XLSX from Indian banks and UPI apps. Headers that don’t start on row one, amounts whose sign lives in a separate column, and password-protected PDFs are all handled. When no built-in parser recognises a format, the file is sent to an AI reader as a document rather than being rejected.
• Builds a budget that fits your income. Goals are funded first, then fixed costs, then what’s left is divided. It shrinks categories to fit — never inflates them to use up a surplus, because being told to spend more is not advice.
• Tells you when a category is going over, measured against how much of the month has actually elapsed rather than against the month as a whole.

What it doesn’t do yet

Being straight about the gaps is more useful than a feature list:

• It cannot connect to your bank. There is no live account feed. You upload statements, or let it read the statement emails your bank already sends you.
• Some spending stays unidentified. When a statement doesn’t say who was paid, nothing downstream can invent it. That spending is shown as unattributed rather than quietly filed under a category it might not belong to.
• Rent is a guess until you tell it. With no history, housing costs are estimated from income, which is the least reliable number in the whole budget. There is a field for your actual rent or home-loan EMI, and filling it in is the single biggest accuracy improvement available.

Your data

Statements and transactions belong to you. They are stored so the app can show them back to you and are not sold or shared for advertising. Where a file needs an AI reader to be parsed at all, its contents are sent to that provider for that purpose only.

Get in touch

Bug reports, a statement format that fails to parse, or a number that looks wrong — all genuinely useful. Send a message.