Money software has a trust problem
Most expense trackers make people do one of two uncomfortable things. They ask for every purchase to be typed by hand, or they ask for access to a remote financial account. Salli takes a third route on Android. It reads transaction alerts that already arrive as SMS, extracts only the evidence it can justify, and keeps the result on the phone.
The useful number on the home screen is not a bank balance. It is what can be spent today after income, savings, commitments, budgets, and the remaining days in the payday cycle have been considered.
A conservative SMS pipeline
The parser is intentionally suspicious. OTPs, promotions, failed payments, pending authorisations, and balance-only alerts are blocked before transaction matching begins. Known message templates run first. A compact local classifier handles unfamiliar wording only when the message still contains deterministic evidence such as an amount and direction.
Every captured item goes to review. The amount, category, account, date, and merchant can be corrected before it joins the confirmed ledger. A category correction can become a narrow on-device rule for that exact merchant. Other edits do not train anything silently.
More than capture
Salli includes category budgets, account matching by the final digits shown in bank alerts, recurring-payment detection, savings goals, payday runway forecasts, custom categories and labels, receipt OCR, transfers, Seettu circles, reminders, encrypted local storage, and English, Sinhala, and Tamil interfaces.
The app is in beta. Its synthetic classifier evaluation is encouraging, but it does not replace validation with real, opt-in, redacted Sri Lankan bank messages. That work remains part of the release gate.
Read the build story
The full engineering case study explains the rule engine, the classifier fallback, deterministic extraction, background Android capture, foreign currency conversion, and the false-positive rules that shape the product.
For practical setup, start with the getting started guide, then continue with automatic SMS tracking and planning, accounts, and insights.