Show HN: Auto-Match – How We Built Receipt-to-Transaction Matching (Open Source)
I’ve been working on automating bookkeeping tasks, and one big pain point was manually reconciling receipts with bank transactions. We built a system that runs in the background, parses receipts (including Gmail), suggests matches, and learns from confirmations to auto-match over time.
It's built into Midday and fully open-source.
Let me know if you have any questions!
In this technical retrospective (2025), @pontusabra shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 39 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 8 comments
Great write up. I worked at a payment processor awhile back, so I really appreciate the complexity of the problem you're tackling.
How are you doing the legal entity resolution? In your example - connecting "AMZN" to "Amazon.com, Inc."
We happen to be solely working on this problem, as it's ridiculously complicated by itself from an global perspective. We're still in stealth and preparing to share something ourselves on HN shortly, but just curious how you're approaching it since your pipeline is already doing a ton.
I know this problem space well. A company I worked for over 10 years ago had a data feed from National Australia Bank (NAB) and matching, categorising and geolocating transactions was an almost daily chore. I would hope by now they're employing something similar to the methodology discussed here.
Interesting write up, thanks for sharing.
I desperately want reconciliation available with an integration for Sevdesk. Any plans?
Awesome!
I'm still patiently waiting for the seft-hosting docs.
Cool bro I would definitely like to use midday