Hey 👋

Hope you’re all having a great weekend!

It’s been an eventful few weeks. My 7-month-old son started eating solids, the weather is back to negative numbers in London, and we’re nearly at 300 active users in Lunch Flow (pinch me please!).

The mission remains to enable everyone to more easily access their personal data in the tools they love, which is why I’m super excited for the updates I’ll share today!

MCP Integration 🤖

You can now connect your favorite AI tools to Lunch Flow (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, whatever…) via a one-click install, powered by our Smithery MCP 🎉

It’s fair to say that we all use an AI chat app for many tasks in our lives, and if you ever wished that you could ask AI questions about your finances, it’s now a few clicks away! You can now ask it questions like:

• "What are my connected bank accounts?"

• "Show me my transactions from last week"

• "What's my current checking account balance?"

• "How much did I spend on groceries this month?"

• "Compare my spending between Chase and Wells Fargo"

This is only scratching the surface, looking forward to what you all come up with! Feedback is welcome as always 😀

New Documentation Site 📖

I’d love to make Lunch Flow as accessible as possible for everyone, but open banking has a lot of nuances, and so does every tool we connect to. To ensure you’re set up for success, I invested a lot into rebuilding our documentation site, to capture all of the key feedback and questions we get and highlight relevant feature requests in context too.

The chatbot is also trained on all this documentation, so it can now respond more accurately to questions. Feel free to give it a try!

I’m working on setting up a feedback loop where all conversations and feedback flow into the website as well. I’m finding this is crucial to keep the support ticket volume in check as we grow 😀 So I can get more time to bring you even more features!

Aside from these big updates, as always, there are a ton of fixes and improvements made to the website. Here’re a few:

Improvements

• Added a deduplication tab for GoCardless accounts to filter out duplicate transactions.

• Improved internal admin dashboard and support process to enable faster responses and follow-up on issues.

• Made a couple of improvements to the dashboard UI (Can you spot them? 😀)

• Improve account selection UI in Lunch Money

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where Lunch Money accounts weren’t loading.

• Ensured transaction IDs are unique per account for Google Sheets

• Escape HTML characters in Lunch Money budget and asset names

What’s next?

Lots of potential next tasks, the question is always about what to take on first, here’re a few ideas based on your feedback:

• I’m working very closely with a couple of the apps we integrate with to better streamline the Lunch Flow integration. I’d love for Lunch Flow to be the de facto banking integration that people build on, and I recognise that for that to happen, the experience should be seamless both for app developers and end users. Stay tuned for that!

• Syncing pending transactions is our top-voted feature request, and I hear you :) Looking forward to learning about even more inconsistencies between how different banks and regions handle transaction data 😅

• So many people have been reaching out about different sources for their bank transactions, be it email, pdf statements, or SMS. Offering an import API that allows people to connect their own sources and leverage the sync and enrichment features that Lunch Flow offers opens up a ton of possibilities!

And so much more …

As always, if you have any feedback or questions, I’m only a message away 😀

Enjoy your weekend!

Hey 👋

Hope you’re having a great week thus far!

For the last couple of updates, you may have noticed big features or new integrations being released, and the response has been incredible. More people are now able to use Lunch Flow, and growth has been ticking up nicely 📈

With that said, I wanted to ensure that the pace is sustainable and that new integrations don’t come at the cost of improving existing ones, so this update is (mostly) about the ‘little things’, all the small issues you may have seen over time, and annoyed you slightly, but maybe weren’t deal breakers.

I’m hoping that with this update, it also encourages you to keep sharing those small nuances, no matter how small, it’s the only way Lunch Flow can keep improving 😀

Also got an exciting announcement at the end for NZ folk! Stay tuned.

Improvements

Navigation & Layout

• Better Mobile Experience: Fixed the mobile sidebar not closing on navigation and improved scrolling on iOS devices

• Clickable Dashboard Stats: Dashboard statistics now provide visual feedback and are clickable for quick navigation

• Connection Upgrade Flow: Added "Upgrade" buttons next to connection counts on Dashboard and Connections page that take you directly to billing

Account Management

• Enhanced Account Details: Transaction tab now available on the account details page

• Account Name Editing: Improved visibility and placeholder text for account name editing

• Account Tab Labels: Updated labels to match API schema (Merchant and Description fields)

• Tab state persistence: Saved changes in Payee/Notes tabs now remain visible after switching tabs

• Use balance currency as account currency: This helps resolve issues around multi-currency accounts or inaccurate account details provided by the banks.

Lunch Money Integration

• Editable Account Configurations: You can now edit Lunch Money account destination settings after initial creation, including asset selection and sync settings. No more needing to reconnect just to change a configuration :)

• Enhanced Transaction Sync: I reworked the transaction sync to get around the previous 7-day lookback limit. Now, if you renew your connection after it expires, it’ll sync all missing transactions, even if the connection expired over a week ago! No more gaps in the sync.

• No more HTML escape characters: If your budget name has characters like ’ or &, they’ll now show up correctly in Lunch Flow as well 😀

• Improved API error handling: On the off chance that things go wrong in our integration with Lunch Money, you’ll now see clear error messages inside Lunch Flow describing the issue! (expired token, failure to get accounts from Lunch Money, etc.)

• Removed connection option: Removed Lunch Money as a connection option to avoid confusion. The original goal was to support Lunch Money as a source and be able to send the data to different destinations; however, it doesn’t seem like anyone needs that, so I will be sunsetting this :) Let me know if that’s not the case.

In addition to many more behind-the-scenes improvements, to enable future updates! Lots of exciting things are cooking up at the moment, specifically around more sources and destinations. If there are other data sources or apps you’d like to send your transactions to, feel free to hit reply and let me know 😀

New Zealand bank support 🇳🇿

I’m excited to share that we are partnering with Akahu, the leading open banking provider for New Zealand, to enable you to connect New Zealand banks to all your favorite tools! If you’d like to try this, feel free to reply with the institutions you’d like to connect, either by responding to this email or commenting on this feedback post. You can find a list of supported institutions here under the ‘Enduring Access’ section.

Thank you all once more for the feedback! and as always, if you have any feedback or questions, I’m only a message away 😀

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm excited to share some major updates that I've been working on for the past few weeks.

Actual Budget Support - Our First Open Source Contribution! 🎉

Having automated bank sync support helped me truly experience the magic that Lunch Money had to offer. I recognise that there are many different personal finance apps that are building great experiences, but without the bank sync, they become a lot less accessible.

A few weeks ago, GoCardless stopped offering its free tier to new users, and focus only on businesses, which means a lot of individuals and families could no longer enjoy their budgeting apps as they used to. And that’s exactly what I’d love to change with Lunch Flow.

I have been a fan of Actual Budget’s for a long time! Even though it didn’t work for me due to a lack of multi-currency support. And when I reached out to the community offering Lunch Flow support as a GoCardless alternative, both the maintainers and the users were very welcoming!

After a lot of feedback and iteration with the community, and a few contributions to the project, I'm thrilled to announce that Lunch Flow now supports Actual Budget! While it’s through an import script, I’m looking forward to continually iterating on this experience and streamlining it even further with the Actual Budget team 😀

New Website Pages 🌟

Lunch Flow started as a Lunch Money add-on for supporting UK & EU banks, but over the past 13 months (time flies!), we grew to support multiple global open banking providers, and support multiple destinations as well, with the vision to be the open banking layer for all personal finance apps.

I’ve been iterating on the website to try and communicate that, and we now have:

1. individual pages for different destinations we connect with, like Actual Budget and our API.

2. Comparison pages against other banking providers, as many users often ask about that, like SimpleFin and GoCardless.

As always, I'd love your feedback on the new pages or the website in general! What do you think? Any suggestions for improvements?

Other Improvements 🛠️

Been working on a ton of improvements in the background, a few examples are:

• Added email notifications for Lunch Money token issues.

• Added a ‘relink’ button for Finverse connections where background sync is not supported due to 2FA being required.

• Added support for syncing Finverse connections to Google Sheets.

• Added support for manually reversing transaction amounts in Lunch Money (in case the bank was sending them the wrong way 😅)

• Fixed an issue with Sure syncing getting stuck if there are many transactions in the account.

• Fixed an issue where the ‘billing’ page was not accessible from the dashboard if any subscription payments were missed.

As always, I'm here to listen and improve. If you have any feedback on these new features or ideas for what to build next, I'd love to hear from you! 💬

Keep the suggestions coming - you're helping shape Lunch Flow's future! 🚀

Hi! I'm excited to share a major new feature with you 🚀

I've built a brand new REST API to make your financial data even more accessible! Whether you want to build custom dashboards, integrate with your own tools, or just export data programmatically, the API gives you full control over your Lunch Flow data.

The API currently supports:

• Listing your connection accounts.

• Retrieving balances and transactions for any account.

The interactive documentation makes it super easy to test endpoints right in your browser - you can find it in your API destination settings. You can also view the public API docs here.

I'd love your feedback on what other endpoints or features would be most useful! This is just the beginning 😊

I also made a couple of improvements:

• Use the transaction’s actual date (when available) rather than the bank’s confirmation date, so now transaction dates should be more accurate.

• A lot of work in the background to facilitate the API and other future updates (switched to monorepo, implemented end-to-end tooling for safer api development, lots of internal refactorings to make the system more maintainable).

Let me know if you’re interested in a deeper dive behind the scenes🕵️ and as always, keep the feedback coming!

💳 Multi-Currency Subscription Payments (USD & EUR)

After supporting only GBP, as we aim to be truly global, we now support USD & EUR for subscription payments! If you have an existing active subscription and would like to switch currencies, simply hit reply, and I'd be happy to update it 😀

💰 [Limited time offer] Reduced Annual Plans

Pricing has been one of the most challenging aspects to nail so far. I wanted to strike a balance between making Lunch Flow as affordable as possible for everyone and ensuring it is sustainable to cover the underlying, expensive open banking integration costs.

The more I think about it, I'd rather have more people using Lunch Flow at fair prices than fewer people at higher margins, which is why, as a thank you for being early adopters for Lunch Flow, if you use less than 4 connections, you can now lower the quantity on the annual plans for a limited time, to get even more cost savings!

This is an area I’m always looking to improve, so if you have additional feedback here, I’m only a message away 😀

📅 Custom Sync Start Date

One of the most highly requested features - you can now choose when the sync starts from when connecting your bank account to Lunch Money.

No more being forced to sync from the beginning of time and needing to remove transactions or clean up duplicates 😀

✅ MX & Finicity Integration Out of Beta

After a lot of iteration and feedback, MX & Finicity integrations are now stable! well … as stable as can be 😅

With that, SimpleFIN and Stripe integrations are being moved to legacy status and will be deprecated soon, as both use MX / Finicity under the hood, so the coverage is overlapping with our direct integration; however, their API and support are far more limited.

The deprecation will help us keep Lunch Flow’s complexity in check and more easily improve (Lots of exciting features incoming, stay tuned!)

🔧 Other Improvements

Also, made numerous smaller improvements across the app, some examples are:

• Fixed some issues with Google Sheets transaction enrichment and auto categorisation - If you're still seeing 'Uncategorised' more often than you expect, let me know 😀

• Added more accurate account error indicators in the UI - So you can easily tell if any accounts are not actively syncing

• Prevent closing the new connection modal by clicking outside it - Which would reset the auth flow for some integrations

🧠 Top of Mind

Actively thinking currently about ways to grow Lunch Flow’s user base to be more sustainable, some options are:

1. Deeper integration with Lunch Money (Like automatic transaction categorisation, even for transactions not imported through Lunch Flow).

2. Build integrations with more destinations, be it other budgeting apps (like Sure, YNAB, Actual Budget, etc…), or more general apps (like Airtable, Notion, Exist, etc.).

3. Offer an API or MCP servers to allow people to easily build apps and workflows leveraging their bank data (similar to SimpleFin’s API).

If you have any thoughts or feedback on these points, or have other things you’d love Lunch Flow to do, please hit reply 😀 I’d love to hear it.

Hey everyone 👋

It has been a few weeks since my last update 😀

As Lunch Flow approaches 100 paying customers (unreal, I know 🎉 thank you all ❤️ Next stop: 1000!), I have been very focused on streamlining the user experience as well as exploring new features. Thank you to everyone who takes the time to share their feedback!

Here are a couple of highlights that I’m excited to share.

Email notifications on MX & Fincity connection issues

Open banking connections are not bulletproof, even more so when it comes to MX and Finicity, given the large number of banks they support and the lack of a standard for bank connections in the US and Canada. This, unfortunately, means that sometimes you need to reconnect your bank in order for the sync to continue.

Lunch Flow now has email notifications to keep you updated if there are any issues with your connection, and allows you to easily reconnect when needed!

Streamlined accounts view

Rather than a separate accounts page that lists all accounts together, accounts are now accessible right under their connection, where you can view their details and edit them without leaving the page 😀

And more …

• Ensure loan accounts have a negative credit balance when syncing to Lunch Money.

• Use the display name if the account name is not available in the Lunch Money account selection drop-down.

• Enable syncing balances only to Lunch Money (and skip transactions)

• Enable global coverage search on our coverage page (not just UK & EU)

Plus a ton of background improvements to my internal tooling and Lunch Flow’s infrastructure to enable me to offer you a better experience!

Top of mind

• Need to scale user acquisition to offset the open banking integration costs, any advice or recommendations are welcome 😀

• Enabling automatic categorisation and enrichment names cleanup

• Simplifying the UI further.

• Considering more provider integrations (SnapTrade for brokerage platforms and Finverse for Asia Pacific banks).

As always, if you have any feedback or questions, I’m only a message or a meeting link away 😀

This is quite an exciting update as it helps me be more responsive when you reach out.

This new chat widget offers an easy way to get in touch with feedback or questions, and track all your conversations 😀 It also allows easy access to help articles and our updates.

As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, I’m only a message away!

This new template showcases our newest enrichment provider integration. It automatically pulls in your bank transactions, enriches them with merchant names and logos, and categorizes them for you - no manual work needed!

Got suggestions for more templates or useful formulas? Let me know!