Ledgerly

Overview

Ledgerly started as a side project between two friends who were tired of budgeting in spreadsheets. I joined as the first engineer and led the product from a rough prototype to a paid product with 30,000 monthly active users.

The challenge

Every bank exports transactions differently. Some use commas, some use semicolons, some put the currency inside the amount and a few skip dates altogether. The product only works if imports feel instant and categories are right the first time.

What I built

• An import pipeline that recognises more than 40 bank formats and processes a full year of transactions in under two seconds.
• A rules engine that learns from manual corrections, lifting categorisation accuracy from 71% to 94%.
• A dashboard rendered on the server and streamed to the browser, so the monthly overview appears before the charts finish loading.

Results

Imports went from the most complained-about feature to the most praised one in user interviews. Paid conversion grew 2.4 times in the six months after launch, and the median dashboard load time sits at 380 milliseconds.