Test it in five seconds
Put your phone in airplane mode and open Genesis. Add a transaction, set a budget, run a report, scan a receipt. All of it works, because none of it was ever waiting on a server.
That is not a feature someone added. It is the only way Genesis was ever built — which is why there is no version of this app where your ledger sits in somebody else's database.
Bookkeeping that actually balances
Most finance apps store a number and hope it stays right. Genesis writes a balanced journal entry for every transaction — debits and credits, the way accounts have been kept for five hundred years. Your balances are derived from that journal, so they cannot quietly drift away from your own history.
It also means you can open the General Ledger and see exactly why a number is what it is, instead of taking the app's word for it.
Money is stored as whole paise, never as a decimal fraction. Fractions of a rupee are where rounding errors are born, and a ledger that is off by a paisa is a ledger you stop trusting.
Built for rupees, not translated into them
Amounts group as lakh and crore, because that is how you read them: ₹1,50,000, not ₹150,000. Large figures shorten the way you would say them aloud — ₹1.5Cr.
Fixed deposits, recurring deposits, SIPs, PPF and NPS are proper instrument types rather than an "other" category. EMIs and monthly bills are recurring entries that post themselves.
Spending in another currency is converted using European Central Bank reference rates, and the original amount is kept alongside the converted one, so a trip abroad still reconciles years later.
Scan a receipt without surrendering the photograph
Point the camera at a receipt and Genesis reads it. The text recognition runs on your phone. When it needs help making sense of what it read, it sends the extracted text — never the image.
So a receipt that happens to show your card number, your face, or the rest of your kitchen table does not go anywhere. Only the words did, and only for that one scan.
What "encrypted" means here, precisely
Vague security language is a warning sign, so here is the specific version. Every claim below is a thing you could go and check.
| What | How | What that means for you |
|---|---|---|
| Your database | SQLCipher, with a 256-bit key generated on your device and held in the Android Keystore or iOS Keychain | Pulling the file off the phone gets an attacker ciphertext. We never receive the key, so we could not decrypt it even if we were ordered to. |
| Documents and receipts | AES-256-GCM, a separate key for every document | One compromised document does not expose the rest. Thumbnails are encrypted too — a preview that leaked the page would defeat the point. |
| Backups to your Google Drive | AES-256-GCM, key derived from your passphrase with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 at 600,000 iterations and a fresh random salt each time | The archive is useless without your passphrase, which we never receive. That also means we cannot recover it for you. |
| The app on screen | Screenshot blocking on Android, blurred app switcher on iOS, biometric lock, one-tap amount masking | Someone holding your unlocked phone still does not get a clean look at your finances. |
If SQLCipher is ever not the engine actually doing the encrypting, Genesis refuses to open the database at all. Plain SQLite silently ignores an encryption key and writes readable data with no visible symptom — a failure that stays invisible precisely when it matters most. The app fails closed rather than carrying on.
The questions worth asking
What if I lose my phone?
Turn on encrypted backup to your own Google Drive and choose a passphrase. Restoring on a new phone needs that passphrase. Keep it somewhere safe — it is the one thing nobody can reissue for you.
What if this app disappears?
Export everything to CSV whenever you like. Because your records were never on our servers, no shutdown can take them from you. The file is already on your phone.
Do I have to sign in?
No. The app works fully without an account. Signing in with Google or Apple is optional and exists for backup.
How do you make money, then?
At the moment, we do not. Genesis is free. There is no advertising, and there is nothing to sell — we do not hold your financial data, so it cannot be part of a business model. If paid features arrive later, they will be stated plainly and priced up front.
Do you track what I do?
Only if you switch it on. Anonymous usage analytics are off by default and stay off until you actively enable them. Session recording is disabled outright.
Who built this
Genesis is made by RapidEngineering.Dev, a small independent developer. Not a venture-funded company with a data strategy and a runway to justify — which is precisely why keeping your ledger on your own phone was an easy decision rather than a sacrifice.
Questions, problems and grievances go to a person who reads them: support@rapidengineering.dev.