Executive Summary
As an MBA student I wanted to learn VBA in order to save time. After graduation, I’m sure that my work will include routine, repetitive tasks. By learning how to automate some of these tasks I will add value at my work and make myself more marketable. One such task that I currently perform on a regular basis is to download and analyze data from a personal budgeting website called mint.com. Mint does a great job of downloading checking and credit card account transaction data and bringing it into one location. However, its data analysis tools aren’t complex or sophisticated enough for the type of analysis I want to do. Once I download the data from mint, I bring my budget numbers and transactions data together and put them into a pivot table. I then create several custom pivot charts. Depending on how many spending categories I want to create, this task can take more than an hour. I decided that this would be a perfect task to automate with VBA. The completed program accomplishes this task with the following steps:
- First, the program logs on to the mint website.
- Once logged on, it imports budget data and downloads all transaction data.
- This data is imported to my budget worksheet and put into a pivot table.
- Five separate buttons execute macros that create custom charts
These charts allow me to analyze my spending behavior compared to other categories or actual budgeted amounts. This program reduces my routine task from an hour to around two minutes. I’m excited to use this program every two weeks as my wife and I set our budgets and analyze our spending behavior. I’m also confident that I can use a modified version of the program as I start a new job in finance with American Express in New York City this next summer.
Write-up: http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/allredn/Write-up.pdf
Excel File:http://files.gove.net/shares/files/10f/allredn/FinalProject.xlsm
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