The spreadsheet came first
I started tracking my own income and expenses in spreadsheets around eight years before building Drachma. Over time it became a real system: monthly day-by-category grids, regular versus exceptional spending, annual targets, account balances and a reconciliation check.
The spreadsheet worked well for me because I knew every convention inside it. That was also its weakness. It was not especially friendly to anyone else, and each improvement required maintaining more formulas and more linked sheets.
The ideas worth keeping
The monthly grid was one of them. It let me scan an entire month and immediately see where the dense days and categories were. The split between Regular and Extra spending was another: holidays or a broken appliance should not make ordinary monthly spending look permanently worse.
The most important idea was reconciliation. A spending log can look complete while still missing something. Comparing what the ledger predicts with the balances actually sitting in your accounts gives you a way to check the record itself.
The other problem was portability
As the workbook grew, it became something I really needed a computer for. Viewing and editing a large budgeting spreadsheet on a phone was awkward, slow and easy to get wrong. That meant keeping the budget up to date usually required sitting down at my desk.
Travel made the limitation obvious. While I was on holiday I was spending more often, in more places, and in different currencies, but logging it properly in the spreadsheet was least convenient at exactly that moment. I would often have to catch up after returning home.
I wanted the same detailed system in a form that was comfortable on a phone: a screen I could read quickly, add to while I was out, and carry with me instead of waiting until I was back at a desk.
Why turn it into an app?
Drachma is an attempt to keep those ideas while removing both kinds of spreadsheet friction: maintaining the workbook and being tied to a desktop. Transactions can recur, instalments can be planned, statements can be imported, balances can be checked, and the same history can be viewed in different ways without rebuilding formulas every time.
