🔥 Weekend Reading

I write a weekly email for people in tech.

Tools and products you should know about, tips about UX, management, infosec; random and funny stuff

Ask your expenses a question

A chart is a filter you have to know how to write. Expense has had those for a while: type the filter, get the chart. The interesting case is the one where you do not know the filter, because you are asking a question instead. Ask "did I spend

Weekend Reading — Invisible as someone else's problem

Cat (D.Burch) Connect to Expense There's a debate going on whether MCP is better than API/CLI access, since modern LLMs have access to the CLI and can do REST over HTTP easily. I think it's a pointless debate. APIs have their own design guidelines,

Expense in foreign currency

The IRS wants foreign spending in dollars, converted at the rate for the day you paid. Not the day you file, and not the day you finally remember the receipt. Expense does that conversion itself now. The rate is the ECB's daily reference for the expense date, fetched

Connect to Expense

A feature can be finished and still be unusable. Expense has had an MCP server for a while: point an assistant at https://expense.labnotes.org/mcp, it discovers the OAuth flow, you sign in once. That part works. The part that did not was the last mile. The how

Weekend Reading — Skeletons in the closet

Neatnik "Everything can be accessible." 🎉🎉🎉 Fastmail just approved Expense’s OAuth client. I believe we's now the first expense tracking app that can collect receipts from Fastmail (and JMAP in general). To me, because I use Fastmail for my emails, it's more exciting than

September 17th, 2026 1 min read

Expense: One receipt, once

There are four ways for the same receipt to enter Expense: forward it by email, drag the file into the editor, let the MCP tool fetch it, connect a mailbox and have it imported for you. Each route used to check metadata on its own, so the same PDF arriving

September 15th, 2026 1 min read

Finding things in Expense

The search box on the expense list in Expense understands fields now. report:, category:, and merchant: match exactly, case-insensitive. description: matches anywhere in the description. Values can contain spaces, so report:2026 travel is one filter and not two. Repeat a key and the values OR together. Mix keys

September 12th, 2026 8 min read

Weekend Reading — It’s a good day to have a great day

Steven Hoefer Fold I love this. ❤️ It's yet another one-person app coded with AI that solves the eternal todo list problem. Sounds utterly redundant, but when you're not building for a huge target market, you can make some insightful choices. Write the task, optional date

September 10th, 2026 1 min read

How Expense reads a receipt

Every receipt that lands in Expense has to become four fields: merchant, date, amount, category. A model can do that. Model calls also cost money and seconds, so the pipeline is built around not making them. Most receipts never reach one. Text comes first. An email body or a PDF