Why I Built Beanly: A Chemistry Teacher’s Answer to a Student Who Couldn’t Find the Right Money App

I’ve spent 25 years teaching A/L Chemistry. Reaction rates, molecular structures, exam techniques- that’s supposed to be the whole job.

But somewhere along the way, I started spending part of every class talking about something that isn’t on the syllabus: money. Not investing tips or get-rich schemes, just the basic, unglamorous discipline of knowing where your money goes. I’d tell my students that understanding a titration curve wouldn’t matter much if they graduated unable to read their own bank statement.

Most of them nodded politely and moved on. One didn’t.

The student who wouldn’t settle

Kasun sat through those classes, finished his A/Levels, and moved on, the way students do. Then he got his first job. A payslip of his own, real income to manage, and suddenly the thing his old chemistry teacher used to go on about wasn’t abstract anymore.

That’s when he started using GnuCash to track his finances – real double-entry bookkeeping, not just a spending diary. It’s a solid piece of software, the kind accountants and disciplined individuals have trusted for years, and it’s what he’d landed on as a fresh employee trying to get his recording right from day one.

Then he switched to Android, and GnuCash simply wasn’t there for him. No official app.

So he went looking for a replacement. He tried the budgeting apps, the expense trackers, the “simple and automatic” solutions that fill the Play Store. None of them fit. Some were too simple – glorified spending diaries with no real accounting behind them. Others were bloated with subscription paywalls, bank-linking requirements he wasn’t comfortable with, or interfaces that fought him at every step.

Eventually Kasun came back to me, not with a chemistry question, but with a request: “Sir, can you make an app that actually does this properly?”

I’m a Flutter and Firebase developer in my other life – I’d already built AMILAGuru, my chemistry platform, from scratch. So the honest answer was: maybe I can.

AMILAGuru, the A/L Chemistry learning platform I built and have run for the past several years, alongside 25 years of classroom teaching.

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AMILAGuru සිංහල App 👉 Install android Now

It wasn’t just Kasun

Before I commit to building anything, I want to confirm whether this is a widespread problem or just one student’s preference. So I ran a survey among my students and their circles, salaried employees, freelancers, other students, and people with multiple income sources.

43 people responded, and the pattern was hard to ignore:

• 72% admitted they’d missed a payment, lost track of a bill, or been genuinely surprised by how much they’d spent
• Only 21% said they follow a budget and actually stick to it
• The most common tracking method wasn’t a spreadsheet or checking a bank app, with no separate record-keeping at all
• Despite that, 44% said they’d definitely use an app that made tracking simple and automatic, and another 44% said “maybe, depending on price and features”

That last number told me the most. People aren’t rejecting the idea of tracking their money. They’re rejecting every tool that’s tried to make them do it so far.

My 43 responses are a small sample, drawn mostly from my own students and their circles – enough to convince me the problem was real, not enough to prove much on its own. So I went looking for larger studies, and the pattern held up at scale:

• Roughly half of U.S. adults still don’t follow a budget, even as the number who do has been slowly climbing — from 47% in 2021 to 53% in 2026, according to Ramsey Solutions’ State of Personal Finance report
• Money worries aren’t rare or occasional — 88% of Americans reported some form of financial stress entering 2026, according to the National Endowment for Financial Education
• Freelancers face a sharper version of the same problem: around 40% report delayed payments that destabilize their budgeting, according to CoCountant’s freelancer bookkeeping research — which tracks with why “salaried employee” and “freelancer” respondents in my own survey described such different frustrations

My small survey told me the problem was personal and immediate. The larger research told me it wasn’t unique to my students, or to Sri Lanka: it’s close to a universal habit gap.

The books that got me here

Kasun’s request landed on ground that had already been prepared. Long before he asked, a handful of books had shaped how I think about money and how I teach it:

• Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, for the distinction between assets and liabilities that most of us never get taught
• The Millionaire Next Door and The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley, for the uncomfortable truth that quiet, disciplined tracking beats appearances every time
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, for the reminder that managing money is less about spreadsheets and more about behavior

The bigger influence, though, was closer than any bookshelf. My wife has been the sharpest influence of all – she’s always been serious about money in a way I’ve learned from over the years, the kind of quiet discipline that no book quite captures. Living alongside that example probably shaped my thinking about money as much as anything I ever read.

As I built Beanly, I wrote down that same thinking as I went – chapter by chapter, alongside the code – until it became a manual of my own: 32 Laws of Money. Not a finance textbook written first and coded later, but the two growing together. A set of principles, written the way I’d explain them in class, aimed at people who want to get their financial house in order without needing an accounting degree to do it.

Where Beanly comes in

Beanly and that manual grew out of the same problem – Kasun’s problem – at the same time.

It’s a local-first, double-entry bookkeeping app: the same accounting foundation GnuCash is built on, the same foundation that’s kept small businesses and disciplined individuals honest for over a century. But built for Android, built for freelancers and indie makers whose income doesn’t arrive in one tidy monthly paycheck, and built to be usable without a finance background.

No mandatory bank linking. No dashboard so busy it becomes another thing you avoid opening. Just a clear, honest record of what came in, what went out, and where you actually stand.

Beanly is live on the Play Store now. If Kasun’s story, or the survey numbers above, sound familiar, download Beanly and see if it’s the app he was originally looking for.

This blog is where the 32 Laws of Money book becomes 32 posts – one law at a time, with the thinking behind it and how it shows up inside Beanly itself. If you’ve ever opened a budgeting app once and never again, this series is for you.