Reckoner Update January 2025

Sorry I missed the update last month, I had a combination of a vacation and some personal drama. There have been quite a few changes to Reckoner in the interim.

🚢 Releases

There have been quite a few changes to Reckoner in the past two months. In particular, the following changes have been made to Reckoner

• Transaction page updates
  • Modified Transaction field, both mobile and desktop to better streamline and display all information
  • Transaction splits are fully grouped and displayed with th original transaction
  • The transaction table is horizontally as well as vertically scrollable in
• Various report updates
  • Text reports are now available!
  • Updated report handling to allow for all reports to follow current date range
  • Gave a slight card color around the display area for a report
• Update transaction editing to make expenses, transfers, and income clearer
• Small Fixes
  • Changed so that reports are more tightly laid out (particularly useful for text reports on mobile)
  • Fixed an app lock issue on iOS (no enter key for virtual keyboards)
• Fix issue 12
  • Fixed issue with transaction filters defaulting to USD
  • Fixed issue with account balances using a two decimal currency for account balances

I have a few other small enhancements I want to get done soon.

🆕 Year 🆕 Direction

There are really two things I want to roll out in the new year: better user onboarding and cloud synchronization.

🙋 Onboarding

This has really been an Achilles heel for Reckoner since the beginning. There is no first time guide or good in-app help. The help I did implement links to some documentation which I don’t keep as up-to-date as I should.

I have been investigating a few ways to integrate in-app tutorials of the like you would see from other apps where nearly all of the screen is grayed out except the part that is being described. I would also like to add a welcome screen to provide basic on-boarding and the ability to setup a pre-defined simple setup to get people up and running quickly. I think this will be needed as a pre-requisite to the feature in the next section.

☁️ Synchronization

I have aspirations to release a cloud based service for two pieces of functionality: 1. Device synchronization and 2. Automated transaction aggregation. I am a ways away from allowing account data aggregation as that increases the liability of the app and I would need to have business insurance since I would necessarily need to have some way of handling sensitive data.

However, for cloud synchronization, I can do that in a zero-knowledge way. In fact I already do so with the PocketBase synchronization. Reckoner for about a year has had the ability to AES encrypt data and synchronize it to other clients via PocketBase. I can just continue to use the AES encryption setup and create a cloud based synchronization target. I plan to use AWS to deploy my cloud infrastructure. However, I can already hear the people cry “You claim to be a privacy service and use the largest cloud provider which could collect data on us?!”. First of all, I am setting up the infrastructure in a zero-knowledge first context so that even I don’t have access to your data. Secondly, if you’re concerned about data collection from IP address, you can use a reputable VPN service to anonymize that information if you so desire.

I am using AWS simply because I have familiarity with AWS services and know how to control my costs. If you know what you’re doing, AWS can be very cost effective. I won’t go into the the nitty gritty, but I plan to use DynamoDB as the primary database and APIGateway allows for direct integration with a DynamoDB query so I won’t need lambda functions for the retrieving and setting of data. I will need to learn about Cognito for user management and then integrate with Stripe for charging users.

Pricing is TBD, but I plan to price it comparably to similar services. For example, (Joplin Cloud)[https://joplinapp.org/plans/] which I used is priced under €30 for a year.

✋ Closing

I hope you have a good new year! I have lots planned for this year, the only question is how much time I have to accomplish this!