I Tried Every Expense Tracker App. Then I Just Used Telegram.

For a few years, my "expense tracking system" was a Notes app. I'd type things in sporadically — "$4.50 kopi", "$12 grab" — then forget about it for two weeks, open it again, cringe at how incomplete it was, and delete everything to start fresh.

Then I graduated to a spreadsheet. Proper categories, colour-coding, even a little pie chart. I was really proud of it. I updated it religiously for about three weeks before the tab quietly disappeared into my browser history.

After that I tried the apps. MoneyLover, Spendee, Wallet, a couple others. They all had the same problem: I had to deliberately go into them. And I just... never did. Not when I was rushing out of a hawker centre, not when I was tapping out at the MRT, not at the end of a long day.

The thing nobody talks about with budgeting apps

Every personal finance article will tell you to "find an app that works for you" or "build a habit". What they don't say is that if the act of logging is even slightly inconvenient, you will find a reason not to do it.

We're not lazy. We're just busy. There's always something else to do in the 30 seconds after a transaction. By the time you sit down to log it properly, you've already forgotten whether it was $8.50 or $9.

The habit you want to build is tracking. Every extra step between a purchase and a log entry is a place where the habit breaks.

Why Telegram made sense for me

I'm on Telegram constantly — group chats, work stuff, channels. It's basically always open on both my phone and laptop. So when I decided to build a bot, Telegram was the obvious choice. No extra app to open, no new interface to learn. You just send a message, same as you would to anyone else.

The flow is: finish paying, open Telegram (already open), type "15.50 chicken rice", done. The bot reads the amount, figures out it's a food expense, and asks me to confirm the category and which card I used. Tap confirm. Logged.

The whole thing takes maybe five seconds. And because it feels like texting rather than filling a form, I actually do it every time.

What it's like for a typical Singapore day

• Morning — kopi and toast at the kopitiam. Type "3.50 kopi peng toast" while waiting for the bus. Done.
• Lunch — mixed rice downstairs. "6.50 mixed rice". Logged before I've even sat down.
• Evening — grabbed stuff from FairPrice. Instead of typing it out, I photo the receipt and send it. Bot reads the total, picks up Groceries, I confirm. Thirty seconds.

At the end of the day I have a full picture of what I spent, without ever opening a separate app or sitting down to "do my finances".

Why I built it on Google Sheets instead of a database

This was a deliberate decision. I didn't want to build another app where your data lives on some company's server and you can only see what their dashboard shows you. That's renting access to your own financial data.

Your data lives in your own Google Drive — as a normal spreadsheet. You can analyse it, share it with your partner, export it, or just open it directly. If you stop using the bot tomorrow, everything is still there.

It also meant I didn't have to build a fancy dashboard from scratch — Google Sheets already has charts, filters, pivot tables. The bot is just the input layer. The sheet is the data.

The SG-specific stuff that matters

Most budgeting apps are built for an international audience, which means they don't really get how Singaporeans actually pay for things. We're not using one card — we're juggling DBS Multiplier, OCBC 365, maybe a Citi card, PayNow, PayLah, and cash at the kopitiam. (If you're still figuring out which cards actually make sense, I wrote about the traps nobody warns you about with credit cards in Singapore.)

So I built payment method memory in from the start. You add your cards once, and the bot remembers which one you typically use for each type of spending. If you always pay for dining with your OCBC 365, it pre-selects that. You only have to change it when you actually pay differently.

I also built a FIRE dashboard — Financial Independence, Retire Early — because that's the end goal behind all this tracking. You put in your income, expenses, savings rate, and target number, and it shows you where you're at. The calculations are in SGD and account for CPF, not some generic USD-based formula that doesn't map to Singapore at all.

The AI part I'm most proud of

Once your expenses are in the sheet, the next problem is actually making sense of them. Most people don't want to build SUMIF formulas — they just want to know if they're on track.

So I built /ask. You type a question in plain English — "how much did I spend on food this month", "what's my biggest category this week", "am I over my dining budget" — and it pulls the answer from your sheet. No formulas, no filtering, no opening a laptop.

The reason I wanted this is that the gap between having data and actually using it is huge. If checking your finances requires effort, you avoid it. If it takes five seconds, you do it all the time.

Honest downsides

Why I built it, and who it's for

I built this because I was in exactly the place described above — tried the apps, nothing stuck, vaguely aware of what I spent but no real picture. I wanted something that fit into how I already lived, not something that required changing my habits to accommodate it.

If that sounds familiar, setup takes two minutes. Open Telegram, start the bot, connect your Google account, and send your first expense. The thing that surprised early users — and me, testing it daily — is how quickly it becomes automatic. After a week it feels weird not to log something.