PayNey is an AI-powered personal finance app that turns your bank SMS, UPI notifications, and receipt photos into clean, categorized transactions — automatically. A hybrid regex + Google Gemini engine reads every payment signal your phone already receives, de-duplicates it, auto-categorizes it, and drops it into a review queue you clear in seconds.
Under the automation sits a complete expense tracker — multi-account ledgers, budgets, analytics, recurring bills, and a monthly AI report — that stays up to date without you logging a thing.
Built with Next.js 15 · React 19 · Prisma · PostgreSQL · Google Gemini · Inngest · Clerk
Comes with a companion Payney-Capture Android app that turns your phone into an automatic transaction feed.
At its heart, PayNey is a complete expense tracker: record income and spending across multiple accounts, organize every transaction into categories, set monthly budgets, and understand exactly where your money goes through dashboards, filters, and analytics. Everything you'd expect from a personal finance app is here — accounts, categories, recurring bills, reports.
What sets it apart is that you barely have to enter anything. Most expense trackers die the moment manual logging becomes a chore, so PayNey removes the chore. Your bank already texts you every time money moves and your UPI apps buzz on every transfer; PayNey reads those signals through its Android companion app, parses them with a hybrid regex + LLM engine, de-duplicates them, auto-categorizes them, and drops them into a Review queue you clear in seconds. The result is the clean, categorized ledger a tracker is supposed to give you — without the data entry that makes people quit.
- Multi-account ledger — track income and expenses across bank accounts, cash, and cards, each with its own running balance.
- Categorized transactions — every entry is sorted into a spending category (by hand or automatically) so your money is always organized and searchable.
- Add transactions any way you like — automatic capture, receipt scan, or a quick manual form; nothing is locked behind automation.
- See where it goes — dashboards, a spend heatmap, top categories, and cash-flow charts turn raw transactions into an at-a-glance picture of your finances (detailed below).
- Reads bank SMS & UPI app notifications via the PayNey Capture Android app — no manual entry.
- Hybrid parsing engine — a fast, deterministic regex pass handles the common Indian bank/UPI formats (amounts, credit/debit direction, UPI Ref/UTR/RRN, VPA counterparties, day-first dates), and falls back to Google Gemini only when the text is ambiguous.
- Smart edge-case handling — understands quirks like "John paid you ₹2" (money received, not spent) and day-first Indian date formats (
05-07-26→ 5 July). - Reference-number de-duplication — the same transaction arriving from both an SMS and a notification collapses into one entry using UPI UTR/RRN plus an amount + time window.
- Snap a photo of any receipt and Gemini extracts the amount, merchant, date, and best-fit category automatically.
- Extracted fields pre-fill the Add Transaction form for a one-tap confirm — nothing is saved until you approve it.
- Everything captured automatically lands here first. Approve, edit, or discard — you're always in control.
- Category suggestions learn from your history via a per-user merchant → category map.
- Raw SMS/notification text is treated as short-lived and automatically wiped once a row is resolved.
- Multi-account overview, spend heatmap, top categories, recent & recurring transactions, and cash-flow charts.
- Filter, search, and slice transactions by account, date range, and month.
- Set a monthly budget and track progress in real time.
- Automated budget alerts email you when you cross 80% of your limit (once per month, per default account).
- Mark any transaction as recurring (daily/weekly/monthly/yearly). PayNey schedules and posts future occurrences on their due dates — drift-free, with missed periods collapsed safely.
- Track money you lend or borrow from friends and family as a separate, exact-decimal ledger.
- Share a public read-only link (a crypto-random capability URL) so the other person can see the balance and repayment history — no login, no private notes leaked.
- Nudge on WhatsApp with one tap when a repayment is due.
- Overpayment protection, row-level locking against double-submits, IST-aware overdue logic, and self-healing repayment totals. (See
DECISIONS.mdfor the full engineering rationale.)
- On the first of every month, PayNey generates a plain-language, Gemini-written breakdown of the previous month's spending — where it went and where to cut back — and emails it to you via a polished React Email template.
- Clerk authentication for the web app.
- Device-token auth for the Android app — paired via a short-lived pairing code, tokens stored only as HMAC hashes (never in plaintext), individually revocable.
- Arcjet rate limiting.
- Exact decimal money math everywhere (no floating-point rounding bugs), parameterized queries, and per-user scoping on every data access.
📱 PayNey Capture (Companion Android App) (Payney-Capture→)
The web app is the brain; the Android app is the senses. PayNey Capture is what makes the "never type a transaction again" promise real.
What it does
- 📩 Reads incoming bank SMS and UPI payment-app notifications and forwards the raw text to PayNey's ingest endpoint.
- 📷 Scans receipt photos and sends them to the receipt endpoint for AI extraction.
- 📴 Offline outbox — captures are queued on-device and synced when connectivity returns, preserving the real capture timestamp so transactions are dated when they actually happened.
How pairing works
- In the web app, go to Settings → Connect and generate a pairing code (valid ~10 minutes).
- Enter or scan the code in the Capture app.
- The app exchanges the code for a device token (returned exactly once). The web server stores only an HMAC hash of it.
- From then on, every capture is authenticated with
Authorization: Bearer <device-token>— no Clerk session needed on the phone.
Device management
- Every paired device shows its label and last-seen time, and can be revoked at any time from the web app.
Note: This repository contains the PayNey web platform. The Android app is a separate companion project that talks to the API endpoints documented below.
The endpoints the Android app talks to. All accept either a Clerk web session or a device Bearer token, resolved by lib/auth/resolve-request-user.js.
| Method | Endpoint | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
POST |
/api/device/pair-code |
(Web) Generate a short-lived pairing code |
POST |
/api/device/pair |
(Phone) Exchange a pairing code for a device token |
POST |
/api/transactions/ingest |
Ingest a raw SMS / notification → parsed PendingTransaction |
POST |
/api/transactions/receipt |
Extract fields from a receipt image (stateless) |
POST |
/api/transactions/receipt/confirm |
Confirm a scanned receipt into a transaction |
PUT |
/api/inngest |
Inngest background-job webhook |
Example: ingesting a captured SMS
POST /api/transactions/ingest
Authorization: Bearer <device-token>
Content-Type: application/json
{
"sourceChannel": "sms",
"rawText": "Rs.499.00 debited from A/c XX1234 on 05-07-26 to SWIGGY UPI Ref 402312345678",
"timestamp": "2026-07-05T13:24:00.000Z"
}The server parses it, de-duplicates against recent transactions, auto-categorizes it, and returns a PendingTransaction for the user to review.
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Framework | Next.js 15 (App Router, Turbopack) · React 19 |
| Language | JavaScript (JSX) |
| Database | PostgreSQL via Prisma ORM |
| Auth | Clerk (web) · HMAC device tokens (Android) |
| AI | Google Gemini (@google/generative-ai) — parsing, receipt OCR, categorization, monthly insights |
| Background Jobs | Inngest (recurring transactions, monthly reports, budget alerts, cleanup) |
| Resend + React Email | |
| Rate Limiting | Arcjet |
| UI | Tailwind CSS · Radix UI · shadcn/ui · lucide-react · Recharts · Vaul · Sonner |
| Forms & Validation | React Hook Form · Zod |
PayNey runs five background functions defined in lib/inngest/function.js — four on a cron schedule, one event-driven:
| Job | Schedule | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Process Recurring Transactions | On demand (throttled 10/min per user) | Posts a recurring transaction's next occurrence and advances its schedule |
| Trigger Recurring Transactions | Daily @ midnight | Finds due recurring transactions and fans out processing events |
| Generate Monthly Reports | 1st of each month | Builds AI insights and emails each user their monthly report |
| Check Budget Alerts | Every 6 hours | Emails a warning when spend crosses 80% of budget |
| Cleanup Resolved Pending Transactions | Daily @ 00:30 | Wipes raw SMS/notification text off confirmed/discarded rows |
┌─────────────────────┐ Bearer device token ┌──────────────────────┐
│ PayNey Capture app │ ─────────────────────────────────▶ │ /api/transactions │
│ (Android) │ raw SMS / notification / receipt │ ingest · receipt │
└─────────────────────┘ └──────────┬───────────┘
│ offline outbox, real capture timestamps │
▼ ▼
pairing code ◀── Settings → Connect parse (regex → Gemini fallback)
│
de-dupe ── categorize
│
▼
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Web app (Next.js) — Review queue → Transactions → Dashboards → Budgets → Loans │
│ Clerk auth · Prisma/Postgres · Inngest jobs · Gemini insights · Resend emails │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
- Node.js 18+
- A PostgreSQL database
- Accounts/keys for Clerk, Google Gemini, Resend, Arcjet, and Inngest
git clone https://github.com/othzer/PayNey.git
cd PayNey
npm installCreate a .env file in the project root:
# Database
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://..."
DIRECT_URL="postgresql://..."
# Clerk
NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY="pk_..."
CLERK_SECRET_KEY="sk_..."
NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_SIGN_IN_URL="/sign-in"
NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_SIGN_UP_URL="/sign-up"
# Google Gemini
GEMINI_API_KEY="..."
GEMINI_MODEL="gemini-2.5-flash" # optional override
# Email (Resend)
RESEND_API_KEY="..."
# Security
ARCJET_KEY="..."
# Public origin — REQUIRED in production for loan share links
NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_URL="https://payney.vercel.app"
# Optional — download URL surfaced on the Connect page
CAPTURE_APK_URL=https://github.com/othzer/payney-capture/releases/download/v1.0/app-release.apknpx prisma generate
npx prisma db pushThis project uses
prisma db push(notmigrate dev) — seeDECISIONS.mdfor why.
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000.
To develop email templates locally:
npm run emailapp/
(auth)/ # Clerk sign-in / sign-up
(main)/
dashboard/ # Overview, heatmap, top categories, recurring
transactions/ # Full transaction list with filters
transaction/ # Create + receipt scanner
accounts/ # Multi-account management
review/ # Approve/edit captured transactions
summary/ # AI monthly summary
loans/ # Lending ledger (+ counterparties, repayments, nudges)
connect/ # Pair the Android Capture app
l/[publicToken]/ # Public read-only loan ledger
api/
device/ # Pairing code + device token endpoints
transactions/ # ingest · receipt · confirm
inngest/ # Background-job webhook
actions/ # Server actions (accounts, transactions, loans, review, AI…)
lib/
transaction-capture/ # parse · dedupe · categorize
auth/ # device-token + request-user resolution
inngest/ # scheduled functions
gemini.js # Gemini client
prisma/schema.prisma # Data model
DECISIONS.md # Engineering decision log
Made with care for people who'd rather live their lives than log their lattes.