These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Automated Budgeting from Mint.com

Executive Summary
Mint.com is a financial website that safely aggregates your banking information to produce budgets and allows the user to see all of their finances in one place.  The website is designed for the masses and leaves a few items that I would like to personalize to make the tool more useful.  The excel tool that I created is for personal use and will allow my family to better forecast budget categories that have been previously difficult to estimate.  The difference is Mint.com allows you to set a budget off of their suggested amount but it’s tough to set a budget without seeing the previous months spend in that specific category.  I’ve designed this tool to be a visual aid and help the user estimate future costs.
My VBA project allows the user to download their Mint.com transactions into excel by inputting their login information into a user form.  The excel file then has easy to use buttons that pull up visual charts and a suggested average budget.  This tool doesn't have a button for every category in the budget because there are only four major categories that I need a visual aid to evaluate before setting the next month’s budget.
I’ve also included a button to email a notification.  Often when setting or analyzing a budget, family members should be included with warning signs in the major spend categories.  This email notification button allows the user to send a quick message to notify others that use the same budget.  It will also send the active chart so others can visualize the category.

My VBA project will be beneficial to those that want to see a visual graph of the previous month’s expenses in a certain category.  This tool will allow more accurate forecasting for the major category spends and allow a family to tighten the budget in the categories that normally have a high variance expense month to month.

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