Article one of this series covered why I am building Moneta. This one is about what it actually does right now, because a vision without a working product is just a mood board. Everything below is shipped and in daily use by its first household, mine.
You say it, it gets booked
The core loop takes one sentence. Tell Moneta "spent 4,500 on groceries yesterday" and it books a balanced double-entry transaction: money leaves your cash account, lands in groceries, both sides recorded, nothing for you to fill in.
If the purchase was in a second currency, Moneta resolves the exchange rate from a shared reference register and cites it on the entry. If you claim a rate that differs from the reference, the booking stops and asks you to confirm. That one rule has caught real mistakes, because the rate you remember and the rate the market had are not always the same number.
The History screen leads each row with the figure you actually spoke, in the currency you spoke it in, with the base-currency amount underneath. I wrote about why in the previous article: the record should sound like you, not like an accounting system.
Ask for the whole picture
"How are we doing?" gets a full household report computed by the server, not by Moneta's conversational side. Net worth, money in and out, top spending with share bars, credit card usage meters, currency exposure, and how this period compares to the last one. Moneta's conversation chooses which sections to show and writes the commentary; every figure comes from the ledger.
That split matters. A chatterbox that computes your own net worth is a chatterbox that can round the wrong way, halve a number, or answer a question you never asked. In Moneta the accountant never does arithmetic on your money, and the instruction that keeps it that way is built in at the deepest level. The chat renders the numbers as cards you can read at a glance, and the full precision always lives in History.
Accounts that live and retire through conversation
Describe a new account in your own words, approve the card, and it exists, sorted into the chart with a behavior profile attached. Retiring one is the careful version: the balance has to be moved out first, the step is reversible until it is finalized, and the account refuses new money while it waits.
Both doors record the event in the audit trail, and neither runs until a member approves it. Moneta can propose a new savings account at midnight. It cannot create one without you.
Corrections instead of deletions
You cannot delete or edit a transaction in Moneta. Nobody can, including me. Fixing a mistake books a compensating entry, an exact reversal at the original exchange rates, optionally followed by the corrected version. The original stays.
Anyone who has kept real books will recognize this. It is how proper accounting has always handled mistakes, because history that can be quietly rewritten is not history. A partner who asks "did we really spend that?" can follow the whole chain in History, every correction linked to what it fixed.
The rest of the shipped surface
- Multi-currency from the ground up. A household base currency, accounts in any ISO 4217 currency, one shared reference-rate register, and honest citations on every converted figure.
- Privacy levels between partners. The admin sets three visibility levels, and the database enforces them. A hidden transaction is absent from the results, never masked with a "hidden" placeholder.
- Dashboards for each side. A personal view and a household view, with category spending, credit meters, and prior-month comparisons.
- Your data leaves when you do. Full export to CSV or JSON, filtered by exactly the visibility rules in force.
- Dark mode, themes, and a real mobile app view. Version 0.7 rebuilt every screen for the phone, with bottom sheets instead of side panels and a one-handed chat.
Where the capability line sits
Moneta is pre-1.0 and honest about it. Receipt scanning, bank feeds, and budgeting rules do not exist yet. The two-member design is fixed by intent, and the households that want it are households that want it exactly that way.
What exists now is the hard part, done. The ledger is real and permanent. Moneta is scoped, approves before it acts, and cannot touch a figure it was not given. If you run a small business and want to see this pattern, a conversation in front of your records with the record itself kept safe, I build exactly this for clients. Book a call and tell me what your team is still typing into forms.
