Team TASEWA’s Expense Tracker Application
Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
If you don’t track your expenses during the year, you’ll have to look for information and take time to find out what you spent your money on. It will be an additional job that takes up a lot of time; time that could have otherwise been used for other crucial tasks. People usually fail to properly manage their expenses, since they don’t have time nor the means to efficiently keep track of how they spend. If you can track your expenses all the time, you won’t have to immerse yourself in tax reporting. Moreover, when people ignore from constantly planning their finances, they often live in debt or from one salary to another.
Considering the above, we decided that something needs to be done about these issues. If you can track everything in an expense tracker application, it will help you think more about spending money wisely and not ignoring the inflow and outflow of funds.
After doing some research, we noticed the following:
- College students often forget to keep track of the money they spend in a month for food, clothes, rent, and other requirements.
- For a person in the marketing domain, most of his expenses can be tracked using Google Sheets but there is a high risk in making accidental changes, like deleting important columns. Also if there are multiple copies of this sheet, then it’s difficult to find, make changes and keep a record of the person’s expenses.
- In the business domain, it’s important to reduce the budget in case of overrun or lack of profit. Whatever the reason may be, it’s important to have an accurate history of expenses to make a well-informed decision. A person could harm the business without proper expense tracking.
Hence we decided to develop an expense tracking application to help people of all ages in managing their finances.
WHAT ARE THE FEATURES AND STRENGTHS OF THIS APPLICATION?
Features:
- Budget Amount: It takes the budget amount from the user and displays it.
- Create an Expense List: A form that takes the expense name and amount.
- Display Expense List: It displays the list of expenses entered by the user.
- Edit Expense List: Allows the user to edit an expense that has already been created.
- Delete an Expense: Allows the user to delete an expense.
- Calculate Expenses: It calculates all the expenses and displays the total amount.
- Update Balance: It subtracts the total expense from the budget amount and updates the total balance field.
- Backup: In case of any issues, the data will not be lost as it will be backed up.
Strengths:
- User friendly: A new user will be able to understand how to use the web application without the need to refer to any documentation
- Constant Reminders: Helps the user to know when they’ve exceeded their planned budget.
- Effective Data Analysis: The user can look through their past data (Graphically Represented) and review their expenses.
CHALLENGES
- Data Storage: It might be difficult to keep track of data as it accumulates in the long run.
- Safety and Security: It might be difficult to secure our web application against all possible security threats.
- Multiple User Access: Multiple users accessing the application at the same time should not affect the overall performance of the application.
TECHNOLOGIES WE PLAN TO USE
- HTML
- CSS
- JavaScript
- Google Sheets API / PostgreSQL
CONCLUSION
It is important to plan our finances properly as we’ll never really know what will happen tomorrow. One such example is COVID-19. Nobody was expecting the pandemic and many lost their jobs and got affected financially. Hence it’s crucial to plan our budget to avoid any financial mishaps in the future. We should be well prepared for any situation; and this is exactly we aim for through our application. Anyone can plan and track their expenses daily and maintain a budget so that they can be future-ready.
