Obsidian expense tracking: every receipt as a note.

Why the Obsidian format is a good home for receipts

Every expense app eventually does the same thing: it locks your history inside its own database. Cancel the subscription, and your years of spending data are awkward to get out — or gone. Storing receipts in the Obsidian / Markdown format flips that. Each receipt is a plain-text file: readable in any editor for the next twenty years, searchable, greppable, and yours to back up however you like. No lock-in, no proprietary export, no "sorry, that's a premium feature." The format outlives any single app — including this one.

What a receipt looks like as a Markdown note

The trick is structured frontmatter (the YAML block at the top) plus a readable body. That gives you machine-queryable fields and a note a human can skim:

receipts/2026/06/2026-06-12_Tian-Tian_12.60.md

---
date: 2026-06-12
shop: Tian Tian Chicken Rice
amount: 12.60
currency: SGD
category: Food & Dining
source: voice
---
# Tian Tian Chicken Rice — S$12.60
Category: [[Food & Dining]]
· Chicken rice — $6.00
· Lime juice — $2.00
· Soup — $4.60

Because the category is a [[wikilink]], the moment these notes sit in an Obsidian vault, Obsidian builds a backlinked page for "Food & Dining" listing every receipt in it — a free spending breakdown with zero setup.

How you actually use it: Telegram in, Markdown out

Here's the part worth being clear about, because it's where Magpie differs from a hand-built Obsidian setup: you don't sit in Obsidian typing these notes. That's the chore that kills expense tracking. Your interface is Telegram — you snap a photo, send a voice note, forward a PDF, or type a line, and Magpie's AI writes exactly the Markdown note above for you. You confirm it, edit in plain English, or split a bill, all in the chat — and you can even ask "how much did I spend on food this month?" right there. During the beta those notes are hosted for you in Singapore, so there's no vault to set up and nothing to sync. Obsidian isn't the app you open day to day; it's the format your data is kept in.

Your data, in your own Obsidian — whenever you want

Because everything is stored as open Markdown, moving it into your own Obsidian is one command: export the whole set as a folder of .md files and drop it into a vault on your machine. That's when the full Obsidian experience opens up — the graph, backlinks, and Dataview queries that total your month, group by shop, or filter by currency, all running on data you fully control. Prefer to walk away entirely? Delete every trace with one command. The point isn't that you must use Obsidian — it's that nothing ever stops you. You're never locked in, and your receipts are never used to train AI.

Why "own your data" matters more for money than notes

You might tolerate a notes app holding your data hostage. Your financial history is different — it's the record you'll want years from now for taxes, disputes, or just understanding where the money went. Keeping it as plain Markdown in the Obsidian format means it outlives any single app, including this one. That's the entire point.