LedgerLite

A clean, privacy-first expense and subscription tracker for iOS. Built with SwiftUI and SwiftData — no accounts, no cloud required, everything on device.

Features

• Quick Add — log an expense in seconds with a large amount numpad, category strip, merchant suggestions, and reusable templates
• Receipt scanning — point the camera at a receipt (or pick a photo) and on-device Vision OCR pre-fills the amount, merchant, date, and currency. Line items land in the note as an itemized breakdown — including discounts and add-on tax, so the breakdown sums to what you were charged. Works across languages (English, German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, …)
• Runway forecast — enter your balance and next payday to get a truly safe to spend per day figure, a what-if simulator, and the bills due before payday
• Spending log — browse by day, with fast case- and diacritic-insensitive search across all expenses ("cafe" finds "Café") and category filters
• Bills — track recurring subscriptions with any billing cycle, pause/resume/cancel, see the estimated monthly cost, and get reminders 2 days before each renewal
• Auto-detect — paste a billing email or SMS and the app extracts the subscription details
• Insights — spending by category, daily/monthly trends, budget progress, daily heatmap, and top merchant — across week, month, year, or all time
• Budgets — monthly limits per category with alerts at 80% and 100%
• Multi-currency done right — amounts are stored as integer minor units with the exchange rate frozen at entry, so historical totals never drift. Switching home currency re-converts your history at each expense's own historical rate. Live rates come from Frankfurter with an automatic fallback provider
• Siri & Shortcuts — "Log an expense" and "What's today's total" work hands-free
• Widgets — Today total, Runway safe-to-spend, and upcoming Bills on your Home Screen or Lock Screen
• Face ID lock — optional biometric lock, with a privacy cover so balances never show in the app switcher
• Spotlight — logged expenses are searchable from system-wide search
• CSV backup — export expenses and subscriptions; re-import expenses on a new device

Privacy: there are no accounts, no analytics, and no servers. The only network traffic is fetching exchange rates from keyless public APIs.

Requirements

• iOS 17.0+
• Xcode 16+
• XcodeGen — brew install xcodegen

Getting started

git clone https://github.com/tqakdev/ledger_lite.git
cd ledger_lite
xcodegen generate
open LedgerLite.xcodeproj

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml. The generated project.pbxproj is committed (so the repo builds out of the box), but it is never edited by hand: change project.yml, re-run xcodegen generate, and commit the regenerated file — also after adding or removing source files.

Run on your iPhone (free Apple ID)

1. Xcode → Settings → Accounts → sign in with your Apple ID.
2. LedgerLite target → Signing & Capabilities → Automatically manage signing → set Team to your Personal Team.
3. Repeat for the LedgerLiteWidget target.
4. Select your iPhone and press ⌘R.

If signing fails on App Groups, register group.com.enes.ledgerlite in the Developer Portal (free accounts can create App Group IDs), then click Try Again in Xcode.

Architecture

MVVM with a clean layered separation: Views talk only to ViewModels; ViewModels call Repositories and Services; nothing below the ViewModel layer imports SwiftUI.

Layer	Path	Responsibility
Models	LedgerLite/Models/	SwiftData entities (Expense, Category, Subscription) + Money
Views	LedgerLite/Views/	SwiftUI screens and components
ViewModels	LedgerLite/ViewModels/	@Observable + @MainActor; owns UI state
Repositories	LedgerLite/Repositories/	SwiftData fetch/insert/delete
Services	LedgerLite/Services/	Currency rates, receipt OCR, subscriptions, Siri intents, widgets
Utilities	LedgerLite/Utilities/	CSV, Spotlight, budget alerts, UserPreferences, extensions
Widget	LedgerLiteWidget/	WidgetKit extension (Today, Runway, Bills)
Tests	LedgerLiteTests/	200+ unit tests across models, ViewModels, services, parsers

Key design decisions:

• All money is stored as Int (minor units, e.g. cents). Double is never used for monetary values.
• Exchange rates are frozen at entry time (exchangeRateToHome) so historical totals never drift; every aggregation converts through one canonical helper (Expense.homeMinorDecimal) and rounds once at the end.
• Receipt parsing is pure and fully unit-tested: Vision feeds geometry-reconstructed rows (ReceiptLineGrouper) into stateless heuristics (ReceiptTextParser) — no UI, no OCR needed in tests.
• @Observable macro throughout — no ObservableObject, no @Published.
• All async work uses structured concurrency (async/await, Task). No Combine.
• User-facing strings use String(localized:) — localization-ready.
• Logging uses os.Logger per subsystem, with default redaction protecting amounts and merchants in release builds.

Testing

xcodebuild -project LedgerLite.xcodeproj -scheme LedgerLite \
  -destination 'platform=iOS Simulator,name=iPhone 17 Pro' test

The financial core (money math, currency conversion, forecasting, parsers) is covered by characterization tests pinned to real-world data — including real-receipt OCR output in several languages.

CloudKit sync (future)

iCloud sync via CloudKit is planned. To enable it on a paid Apple Developer account:

1. Register the App Group group.com.enes.ledgerlite in the Developer Portal.
2. Register the CloudKit container iCloud.com.enes.ledgerlite.
3. Add both to the App ID com.enes.ledgerlite.
4. Set DEVELOPMENT_TEAM in project.yml to your 10-character team ID.
5. Re-run xcodegen generate.

The App Group is already wired in both the app and widget entitlements so the widget can read the same SwiftData store via a shared container URL.

License

MIT