Welcome to Kharchapatra — a personal finance tracker for Nepal
Why we built a budget app around Nepali bank statements, रुपैयाँ, and Bikram Sambat — and what you can do with it from day one.
Most personal-finance apps are built for a world Nepal doesn't live in — one with neat bank APIs, USD as the default currency, and a calendar that ends in December. Kharchapatra starts from the reality you actually have: a PDF statement from your bank, a wallet export from eSewa or Khalti, and a monthly budget you write in रुपैयाँ.
This is the first post on our blog. Here's what we hope it covers — and what you can do with the app today.
What Kharchapatra does today
You don't need an open-banking API to know where your money went. You need a fast way to drop a statement in and see clean rows on the other side.
- Statement imports. CSV, PDF, and Excel from any Nepali bank or wallet. The app auto-detects columns, lets you tweak the mapping, and skips rows you've already imported.
- Auto-categorisation in English and Nepali. 150+ keywords across 24 categories — पसल, खानपिन, यातायात, and the rest. Your overrides always stick.
- Multi-account net worth. Bank, wallet, cash — one balance view, individual statements, no spreadsheet maths.
- Budgets that nudge. Set a limit per category. Get a heads-up at 80% and again when you cross — not after the month closes.
- Bikram Sambat dates everywhere. Filter by Nepali fiscal year. Set a goal to land on Dashain. Read your tax in BS — the calendar your accountant actually uses.
Why a blog?
Because building the app is half the work. The other half is the unwritten knowledge of how people in Nepal actually manage money — which banks export the cleanest CSVs, how to handle a Khalti transaction that splits across two months, what the new fiscal-year tax brackets actually mean for a salaried worker on रू 50,000/month.
We'll write about those here. Some posts will be product walkthroughs. Some will be opinionated takes on personal finance for Nepal. Some will be small spreadsheet hacks we wish we'd known sooner.
What's next
A few things lined up for the next few weeks:
- Importing an NIC Asia PDF, end to end. A walkthrough with the actual file — column mapping, dedupe, and what to do if OCR misreads a row.
- Budgeting in Bikram Sambat. Why fiscal-year (BS) budgets work better than calendar-month ones if you get paid in NPR.
- The Nepali tax helper, explained. What slabs the app uses, what it can't infer, and how to read its estimate alongside your salary slip.
If you haven't yet, you can create an account — Kharchapatra is free during beta, no card required.
Thanks for reading. Real money in रुपैयाँ, real dates in BS, real categories in नेपाली. That's the whole pitch.