I have a bad habit.
I spend money, then somehow forget where it went.
Not in a dramatic “where did my RM 300 go?” kind of way. More like, “Eh? Baru awal bulan kan?”
So naturally, instead of doing the normal thing and becoming better at managing money, I decided to build an app.
Meet MCMG — Money Comes, Money Goes.
The idea started pretty simple. I wanted somewhere to keep track of my spending without feeling like I was filling out an accounting spreadsheet every time I bought something.
I also wanted it to answer questions that a normal expense tracker doesn’t really answer.
How much money am I actually committed to every month?
What do I owe?
What am I investing?
And most importantly…
Can I actually afford this, or am I just emotionally attached to the idea of buying it?
So I started building.
The first version was basically just a finance app. Track expenses, commitments, debts, investments & the usual stuff.
Then, because apparently I don’t know how to keep things simple, I started thinking about receipts.
What if I could just take a photo of a receipt and let the app figure out what’s inside?
That led me down another rabbit hole: OCR, receipt parsing, categorisation, and eventually the idea of having a little chat interface around it.
And then came the most important feature:
The SnackBar.
When your balance starts looking suspiciously low, instead of giving you a boring red warning, MCMG could basically tell you:
“Bestie, maybe jangan beli tu dulu.” but currently in my phone, IT IS WORSE.
A financial app, but slightly judgemental.
Exactly what I needed.
The interesting part about building MCMG isn’t really the app itself. It’s all the little problems that appeared while building it.
How should expenses be categorised?
What counts as a commitment?
How do you represent debt?
How do you make financial information useful without making the interface feel like Excel?
And how do you build something that people might actually want to use instead of something that just looks good in a portfolio?
I’m still figuring those things out.
That’s probably what I like most about building side projects. You start with one small idea, then suddenly you’re three weekends deep into something you never planned to build.
MCMG is still a work in progress.
But at least now, when I wonder where my money went, I can blame the app for not telling me.
Things I learned, built, or am still figuring out.
This one happens to be all three.
—SA