About the maker

Hi, I'm Madhavi 👋

What started as curiosity — “what happens if I change this line?” — slowly turned into a habit, then a career, and eventually a worldview. Twenty years later, I still get the same satisfaction from watching a tedious process disappear behind a few lines of code.

I have a simple rule: if I have to do something boring more than twice, I start wondering why a human is involved at all.

That rule has followed me everywhere.

By day, I run CypherTree, an Employer of Record platform that helps European companies hire and pay people in India without setting up a local entity. Underneath that simple promise sits payroll, compliance, onboarding, contracts, reimbursements, invoicing, and countless operational processes that most people never see. After spending years working across the India–Europe corridor, I realized that many business problems aren't actually difficult — they're just repetitive, fragmented, and surprisingly manual. My job is to make that complexity disappear.

fwdexpenses comes from exactly the same place.

My specific itch: almost every invoice I get is in USD or some other foreign currency — Anthropic, Vercel, AWS, OpenAI, the usual SaaS stack. My card gets charged in INR after the bank applies its FX rate. Then once a month, the statement shows up and I'm sitting there manually matching ₹1,964.84 to $20— except the math never quite lines up because of conversion spreads. It felt absurd that in a world where computers can recognize images, understand language, and write software, I was still doing this reconciliation by hand. So I built something that takes the forwarded invoice, extracts the amount in its original currency, and matches it to the right INR line on the statement — even when the numbers don't agree to the rupee.

Then I put it online.

Not because I wanted to start a company around receipt processing. Not because a market report told me to. Simply because I figured I probably wasn't the only person annoyed by the problem.

fwdexpenses is intentionally small. It's built during evenings and weekends, free during beta, and supported by the occasional ☕ from people who find it useful. There's no venture funding, growth team, board meeting, or quarterly strategy deck. Just one engineer following the same instinct that has driven every project I've built for the last two decades:

If a problem is repetitive, error-prone, and boring, a computer should probably be doing it instead.

But why not just use Zoho or Expensify?

Fair question. Those tools are built for HR teams managing employee reimbursements — approvers, policies, audit trails, the works. Great for a 200-person company. Wrong shape for one person who just wants to know where their money went — and none of them reconcile a USD invoice against an INR statement line.

Also, honest version: after 20 years of coding, sometimes the best answer to “why build it” is “because I could, and it took less time than evaluating five SaaS vendors.”

If you want to say hi or follow along:

Liked fwdexpenses? There's a ☕ Buy me a coffee button in the footer — UPI works directly, no platform in between.