Moolah
Personal finance web app•2026
Overview
A private personal finance ledger for Filipino money life—accounts, budgets, goals, installments, and cashflow in one calm desk you control.
Moolah is a personal finance web app built for people who juggle cash, bank accounts, e-wallets, credit cards, and BNPL in the Philippines. Sign in once, keep multiple profiles (personal or side hustle), log spend and income in seconds, watch budgets and savings goals, track debts and receivables, and see what is coming next with bills and installment schedules. No bank logins, no payment rails—just a clear peso desk that stays private and online across devices.
Goals and Motivation
Most people in the PH still bounce between spreadsheets, bank apps, and memory to answer a simple question: can I afford this after rent, cards, and pay-later installments? Wallet apps show one slice; spreadsheets go stale. Moolah aims to be the single online ledger for where money lives and what is coming due.
Goals
- •Give individuals a secure online ledger with auth and sync across devices
- •Model real PH money shapes—cash, banks, cards, e-wallets, BNPL, loans—not only a single wallet balance
- •Make daily logging fast: expense, income, and transfers with categories and tags
- •Surface budgets, savings goals, debts, and installment plans in one calm interface
- •Show cashflow and upcoming obligations so decisions are based on the next weeks, not last month's vibes
Motivation
I wanted a finance desk that matches how money actually moves here—peso amounts, mixed accounts, credit and pay-later schedules—without turning into a bank or a group bill-split product. Moolah is built so you can see today's position, log what happened, and plan what is coming next with clarity you own.
Tech Stack Used
Features
- •Secure sign-up and sign-in with session cookies and private online sync
- •Profiles for personal books or a separate side-hustle ledger
- •Accounts for cash, banks, e-wallets, credit cards, BNPL, investments, and loans
- •Fast expense, income, and transfer logging with categories, subcategories, and tags
- •Budgets by category with clear progress against monthly limits
- •Savings goals with contribute and withdraw flows
- •Debts and receivables tracking alongside credit and BNPL installment schedules
- •Cashflow-oriented views for upcoming bills and obligations
- •Reports-ready ledger foundation with export-friendly data model
- •Calm light UI with responsive layout for desk and mobile web
Challenges
Modeling mixed Philippine money shapes—cash, cards, e-wallets, and pay-later—without collapsing everything into one wallet balance required a careful account and ledger design so transfers stay balanced and reports stay honest.
Keeping auth secure across a separate API host and a Vercel frontend meant solving cross-site session cookies; we settled on a same-origin proxy so sessions stay first-party while the API remains on its own service.
Field-level encryption for sensitive values at rest had to stay usable day to day—key management and stable secrets matter, because rotating the encryption key without a migration path would make existing ciphertext unreadable.
Rate limiting and CSRF defenses for cookie-authenticated browsers needed production defaults (proxy trust, origin allowlists, and auth route limits) that still feel fine on a single-node deploy.
Drawing a hard product boundary against group bill-splitting kept scope honest: Moolah is a personal ledger, not a barkada settle-up app, so features had to reinforce individual books and installments instead of multi-person splits.
Gallery
Repositories
Outro
Moolah is the finance desk I wanted for everyday Philippine money life—clear balances, fast logging, and a honest view of what is coming due. It is still growing, but the core ledger already supports dogfooding accounts, activity, budgets, and planning views. If you manage cash and cards across more than one account and want a private online ledger, try the live app or reach out.
