Every January, I have the same ritual.
I open my banking apps, squint at the transaction history, and try to figure out how I spent more than I earned despite not buying anything memorable. The numbers don't lie, but they don't explain themselves either.
"Amazon £47.99" — what did I even buy? "Direct Debit TFL" — was that the monthly cap? "Card Payment AMZN" — wait, I thought I cancelled Prime?
This annual confusion is how Farah was born.
The Spreadsheet That Changed Everything
Like many people trying to get a grip on their finances, I started with a spreadsheet. A simple one. Income at the top, expenses categorised below. Net worth tracked monthly.
The problem? Keeping it updated was a nightmare.
I'd open it with good intentions, spend 45 minutes reconciling transactions, get frustrated, and abandon it for three months. By the time I returned, the backlog was so large that I'd just start a new spreadsheet.
Sound familiar?
What I wanted was simple: a spreadsheet that updated itself. No manual entry. No reconciliation. Just wake up, check the numbers, understand where I stood.
Why Not Just Use an App?
There are hundreds of finance apps. Mint, YNAB, Emma, Monzo's built-in spending insights. I tried them all.
They all had the same problem: they wanted to replace my spreadsheet.
But I like spreadsheets. They're flexible. I can add custom columns, create my own categories, build projections. No app can match that freedom.
What I needed wasn't another app. It was a bridge—something that would feed data into my spreadsheet automatically, while letting me do whatever I wanted with it.
Building Farah
The technical foundation was Open Banking. With your permission, banks in the UK now let third parties read your transaction data (read-only, crucially—nobody can move your money).
Farah connects to your banks, pulls transactions, categorises them, and pushes everything to a Google Sheet. Your sheet, your data, your rules.
But raw data isn't enough. That's where the AI layer comes in.
Farah doesn't just dump transactions. She understands them. That "AMZN" charge? She'll figure out it was a Kindle book, not a random purchase. That Direct Debit? She'll track which subscription it belongs to and alert you if the price changed.
We named her Farah, from the Arabic word for joy (فرح). Because understanding your money—really understanding it—brings a certain peace of mind. And that's joyful.
The Tax Problem
If you've ever filed a Self Assessment tax return in the UK, you know the dread.
Boxes upon boxes of questions. "Enter your total income from employment." "Enter allowable expenses." "Have you received any income from property?" The language is designed for accountants, not humans.
Most people either:
- Pay an accountant (expensive)
- Wing it and hope for the best (stressful)
- Use software that's barely better than the HMRC form itself
Farah takes a different approach. She walks you through each box, in plain English, explaining what it means and what number should go there.
"This box asks for your freelance income before expenses. Based on your invoices, that's £34,500 this tax year. Want me to show you the breakdown?"
No jargon. No assumptions that you already know what "allowable expenses" means. Just clear guidance from someone who's looked at your actual numbers.
Built for Founders
The original target for Farah was me—a founder with messy finances, multiple income streams, and zero patience for financial admin.
Turns out, there are a lot of us.
Founders are especially bad at tracking personal finances because we're busy tracking business finances. The company P&L gets updated religiously. The personal spreadsheet? Cobwebs.
But personal financial health matters. Especially when you're in the early days of a startup, burning savings, wondering how long you can keep going.
Farah gives founders visibility without effort. Check your net worth in seconds. See your burn rate (yes, you have a personal burn rate). Know exactly when to take that salary you've been deferring.
Privacy by Design
Here's the thing about financial data: it's intimate. More revealing than browsing history.
We built Farah with privacy as a core constraint:
- Your data stays in your Google Sheet. We don't store transactions on our servers.
- Open Banking is read-only. Farah literally cannot move money.
- Encryption everywhere. Connection tokens are encrypted at rest and in transit.
- Deletion is real. Ask to delete your data, and it's gone. Not archived. Gone.
This isn't just a privacy policy—it's architecture. We designed the system so we couldn't be careless with your data even if we wanted to.
The Weekly Summary
Every Sunday evening, Farah sends a summary. Nothing fancy—just the essentials:
→ What you earned this week → What you spent → How that compares to your average → Your current net worth and how it's trending
One email. Takes 30 seconds to read. Gives you full visibility into your financial life.
The best systems are the ones you don't have to think about. Farah runs in the background, updating your sheet, watching for anomalies, and surfacing only what matters.
What's Next
We're working on smarter projections. If your spending continues at this rate, when will you hit your savings goal? When will you run out of runway?
We're also exploring investment tracking. Farah already knows your cash balances—what if she could also track your ISA and pension?
But the philosophy stays the same: one job, done well. Farah's job is to make your money make sense. Everything else flows from that.
And every January, instead of squinting at bank apps trying to figure out where the money went, you'll already know.