it must be nice to have beanies by your side

As Thomas Jefferson said to James Madison after Hamilton spent an entire song reminiscing about his son Phillip, can we get back to beanies? I’m paraphrasing of course. (Apologies to the non-Hamilton fans out there. By the way, how can you not like Hamilton?! But that’s a topic for another post, I guess.)

I want to apologize for last week’s post. I honestly didn’t mean to write that, it just sort of happened.

From time to time, I may get the urge to write about my family, or vibe coding (a term that seems to be rapidly falling out of favor), or just technology in general.

From now on though, I’ll try to avoid ambushing my precious Substack subscribers with sad, emotionally heavy memoirs just as you were sitting down with your morning coffee, probably getting ready to enjoy a light read. I’ll try, but I can’t promise I’ll succeed.

Maybe if it happens again, I’ll post a warning.

Anyway, let’s get back to the app, because that’s why we’re all here, right?!

I got a fun message from my son’s piano teacher the other day, hitting me with a bill for 3 months’ worth of lessons all at once. While I’m glad that my son has progressed to “level 5”, I didn’t know that comes with a “new and improved” pricing structure. Ouch, that’s a chunk of change.

Expenses for kid’s activities (which we’re all familiar with) hit us in two places at the same time: our finances and our time. I always wished that there was a single place that I could record them both, linking everything together like a marvel of optimization and efficiency, but there never was. So guess what?

Introducing: activity finance linking!

Despite the decidedly boring name (I’ve had a rough week, ok?), this is actually one of the coolest things about beanies.family, and we’ve not talked about it at all yet.

Activity finance linking marries the “family” and “finance” aspects of beanies.family, bringing them together into one big, delicious, delectable beanie stew of family and financial efficiency. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Activities, loans, and other things cost money, so linking them with finances was a natural decision for an app that helps to manage both your family and your finances. Finance linking means you no longer have to keep track of your activities or loans and how much you pay for them in two different places, letting your activity costs and finance transactions remain in sync rather than constantly diverging.

When you create a linked transaction for an activity or a loan, it also shows up in your transactions feed, and contributes to (or, more likely, detracts from) your net worth. With loan payments linked to a bank account, your money is magically deducted from the associated account (poof! it’s gone!) and your accounts are, more or less, kept up to date.

All this without giving away all your personal financial information or uploading bank account transaction CSVs every month. Isn’t it crazy how that works?

From now on, when you create a new activity or asset loan, keep an eye out for the linked transaction fields, like the one circled in the screenshot above. Link loan or activity payments directly to one of your bank accounts, and watch your beans fly (or, fly away).

Keep track of your money and reduce your busywork. beanies.family connects your money with your life… and vice versa.

By the way, if you have a feature suggestion, improvement, or fix you’d like to see that would help your family, I’m always all ears. Drop me a line in the comments on Substack, or via the contact form, and if it’s something that makes sense, I’ll turn it around in a jiffy. Isn’t this new world fun? (Teaser alert - more on that coming up in a future post.)

Stay connected, my beans. Wishing you peace.

greg