A free, open-source, collaborative accounting web application, Cent offers a serverless approach to financial tracking by utilizing GitHub repositories for data storage and synchronization. This enables robust data ownership and multi-user collaboration without reliance on third-party servers, targeting individuals and teams needing a self-hosted or easily accessible financial management tool.

How It Works

Cent operates as a "pure frontend" Progressive Web App (PWA). Financial data is stored as JSON files within a designated GitHub or Gitee repository, facilitating version control and historical rollback. A custom incremental synchronization mechanism efficiently transfers only changed data, optimizing collaborative workflows and reducing sync times. Multi-user access is managed via GitHub collaborators, abstracting away the need for a dedicated backend infrastructure.

Quick Start & Requirements

• Online Demo: Access directly via https://cent.linkai.work using GitHub authentication.
• Self-Hosted: Fork the repository (https://github.com/glink25/Cent) and deploy on a static hosting platform (e.g., Cloudflare Pages). Requires manual GitHub token generation for authentication.
• Local Development: Clone the repository, install dependencies with pnpm install, and run with pnpm dev.
• Prerequisites: pnpm for local setup; a GitHub account for online use.
• Documentation: Blog available at https://glink25.github.io/tag/Cent/.

Highlighted Details

• Data Sovereignty: Full data control via GitHub, Gitee, or WebDAV, eliminating server dependency.
• AI Integration: Features voice-to-text accounting, AI-driven bill analysis, budget suggestions, and category prediction.
• Financial Tools: Supports multi-currency with real-time exchange rates, periodic billing, detailed statistics, budget management, and map-based expense visualization.
• User Experience: PWA support for native-like installation, smart import from WeChat/Alipay, customizable categories/tags, and quick actions.

Maintenance & Community

The project is primarily supported by a single developer. A QQ group (861180883) is available for community interaction. Key features like incremental sync, AI, multi-currency, and WebDAV are complete, with ongoing work on automated testing and additional sync endpoints (Dropbox, OneDrive). Planned features include data export and further AI enhancements.

Licensing & Compatibility

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This license permits sharing and adaptation but strictly prohibits commercial use and requires derivative works to be shared under the same license.

Limitations & Caveats

The CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license strictly prohibits commercial use, limiting adoption for business-oriented applications. Self-hosted deployments require manual configuration of GitHub tokens for authentication, bypassing the convenience of direct OAuth login. Development heavily relies on its single maintainer.