From a young age, I have always been taught the importance of saving money, and ultimately spending less than I earn. When I started a family of my own, the need to save money turned from a nicety to a necessity, with every dollar of income being so valuable to our getting by each month. As I approach the end of my “student life” at BYU, my wife and I are determined to continue with our spending habits, even though we will be making “real money” with my new full-time position.
In the past, we have managed our finances through a simple but customized spreadsheet. It works great, but requires a lot of data entry for any expenditure or income. The current process is that the receipts stack up in our wallets for about a month. Then, when we realize that nothing has been done to record our expenses for the last month, we pile them up by the computer until one of us enters them all into the spreadsheet and views the results. This process was screaming for automation, and this class created the perfect opportunity to better track and manage our finances. After all, the first step to saving money is to realize where your money is going. My vision began with a desire to create a solution that I could hand off to family and friends and allow them to use the same program with virtually no training. I wanted it to be robust enough to handle new users in completely new environments without errors or unexpected activity. First, I wanted to create a way that users could dynamically manage their customized categories for expenses and income. Additionally, I realized the benefit of importing the data from our credit card and bank websites, making it much more likely that we would stay more up to date on tracking our expenses. With the help of Dr. Allen’s agent class, I was able to import the data and present it to the user one transaction at a time for categorization and editing.
The files are located here:
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