Who is behind Cuéntamo

The team, today, is one person

As of today, the Cuéntamo team is a single person: David Marín Carreño, a computer engineer who has been self-employed since April 2016. He designs the app, codes it, keeps it running, answers the emails and writes what we publish. There are no investors behind it and no marketing department (hence the “zero investor pressure” line at the foot of our home page).

If you want to know more about him, he has been writing at davefx.com since 2003, and you can find him on LinkedIn and as @davefx on X.

Why it exists

Because David needed it and it did not exist. He has been self-employed since 2016, and for years he kept his finances in an Excel spreadsheet: the income from his business, the household expenses, the VAT formulas and a forecast of his balance. It worked, more or less, until one night he found he had entered the same expense twice in the following month's forecast. It was only a few euros, but enough to make him ask an uncomfortable question: was he in control of his money, or did he only feel like he was?

He looked for something to replace the spreadsheet and found a market split in two. Tools for freelancers work out Spain's quarterly VAT and income tax returns (modelo 303 and 130), but know nothing about your mortgage or whether you will make it to the end of the month after paying the VAT. Personal finance apps tell you how much you have spent, but have no idea what a modelo 303 is or how much you need to set aside for the tax office every quarter. And nobody brought the two together.

So he built it. The forecast came first, because it was what he missed most: not how much money you have today (your bank already tells you that), but how much you are going to have a few months from now, counting the taxes and everything else that is coming. Quarterly VAT and income tax, the record books and the rest followed, each time he ran into a new problem to solve.

He tells the full story on his blog: Why I Built My Own Personal Finance App.

How we handle tax topics

David is a computer engineer, not a tax adviser or a gestor (the Spanish professional who files taxes for freelancers and small businesses). That is why he does not work alone:

• Most articles are drafted with the help of artificial intelligence, which helps to research, cross-check and write. But what gets published (and what the app does) is decided by David, who checks it against the official sources before it goes out.
• He is advised by gestores and tax advisers, who help him understand how the rules are applied in practice. Some of them have also helped to write a few of the articles.

And above everything else, one rule: full respect for the law in force. In practice, that means:

• Every figure, rate or deadline comes from an official source (the BOE, Spain's official gazette; the Tax Agency; the regional rules of the Basque Country and Navarre) and we cite it, so you can check it yourself.
• If we cannot find a source that backs it, we do not publish it or build it into the app.
• We do not write about rules that may still fall through. A royal decree-law, for instance, waits until Parliament has ratified it.
• When the law changes, we update the article or the calculation and say so, with the date.

Even so, we can get things wrong. If you spot a mistake, write to [email protected]: we will fix it, and thank you for it.

Contact

For anything at all, [email protected]. David answers, of course. The details of the service provider are in the terms and conditions.