What it is

Cent-ral: the Central Expense & Net-worth Terminal.

Cent-ral will pull your accounts into one view, so "where did the money go?" has a single answer.

Spending

Every transaction gets a category, by rule first and by hand second. Monthly totals always add up to the transactions under them.

Budgets

A monthly budget per category, shown against what you have spent. A category turns amber at 80% and flags again at 100%.

Net worth

Assets minus debts, as one number with its history. Things the bank cannot see, like a car, can be added and revalued by hand.

Bills

Recurring charges are spotted from your history and listed by due date. You confirm or dismiss each one.

Investments

Holdings per brokerage account, counted in net worth. Version 1 shows what you hold, not how it is performing.

Phone and desktop

An installable web app that works on iPhone and in a browser on Windows and Mac, with the same data in both.

Trust

Read-only, locked down.

Cent-ral will hold bank data, so the safety rules are written before any real account is connected.

It cannot move money

No payments, transfers or trades. Every bank connection is read-only.

No passwords, no full numbers

You sign in to your bank in the bank's own window; Cent-ral never sees the password. Accounts show only their last four digits.

Login on everything

The app and its API sit behind a login. Bank access tokens are stored encrypted, and removing an account revokes the connection at the source.

Exact to the cent

Amounts are stored as whole cents, never decimals, so totals match your statements.

The plan

Seven phases, one at a time.

Cent-ral is still on paper. Each phase ends with something usable, and real account data only appears after the login and encryption are built and tested.

  1. P0

    Setup

    Repo, hosting, the cent-ral.app domain, login, data model and encryption.

    Next
  2. P1

    Ledger and import

    Accounts, transactions, categories and rules, and CSV import for history.

    Queued
  3. P2

    Bank sync

    Daily read-only sync, de-duplication, and an alert when a sync fails.

    Queued
  4. P3

    Budgets and spending

    Budget vs. actual, 80% and 100% flags, and spending charts.

    Queued
  5. P4

    Net worth and investments

    Daily snapshots, manual assets and the holdings view.

    Queued
  6. P5

    Bills

    Recurring-charge detection and an upcoming-bills list.

    Queued
  7. P6

    Ask Claude

    A read-only connector, so a chat can answer questions about your numbers.

    Queued

Not in version 1

  • Moving money of any kind
  • Tax preparation or filing
  • Financial advice or buy and sell tips
  • Credit score tracking
  • Native iOS or Android apps
  • Accounts for other people, sign-up or billing

Made for one user first. A public version is possible later and would get its own plan and security review.

Also from RZRBLL

Looking for something you can use today?

Bench-mark is a lifting log with a coach that shows its work, and it opens a waitlist now.

See Bench-mark