This is the homepage of a homegrown finance app for home finances, meant for all open-source & homely homies homing about in a quest for a tool to manage their finances. :)
Current Status: Repository has been inactive for a while but a random surge in motivation for the developer to suddenly make it active with tons of improvements is due! The surge is approaching.
I am very glad you asked. Really. Well, there are tons of reasons. Here are some of the good ones:
- Well...it is useful, actually. This app is actually useful. Really. So many functions too.
- Feel like a techie, sudo style! This app is very clunky and unnatural. It has the console open in the background and requires you to click the buttons rather than tab-enter, very cryptic usage pattern, weird old looking UI, along with forcing some options to be answered on the console. Only the coolest programmers use such apps. :)
- Support Education. If you star this, or download this, contribute to this, or simply use this, at least one person shall be inspired to learn more about the stuff involved in the programming of this app, and in general educate himself (me). That is a very noble task, meant only for truly noble men/women like you.
- Be a part of bleeding edge software. Tons of bugs, seriously required UI improvements, unlimited scope for improvement, cool but pointless integrations like cryptography support and an active developer - all the hallmarks of a bleeding edge software.
- Spread Smile(s) and reduce plastic. Guaranteed one smile per star/download/contribution. Make the world a happier place. Also, developer guarantees recycling at least 1 bottle per download/star/contribution.
- Learn patience, planning for technical contingencies (what if you lose the data), perseverence and meticulousness. All of these are essential life skills, and the app is created to inculcate these in young men/women of this very value-less era.
- You (the user) don't care about home finances in reality as much as you care about pretending to care. Perfect app for this purpose. Any one wanting to double check if your maintained database is actually good/consistent/honest will give up after getting a feel of the app. Highly secure wool over their eyes.
- This developer has actually taken pains and written all this? I should at least see his app. Yes, you should. Definitely.
- Play hide and seek in the code Decide on what you want to find in there (say the label corresponding to the date in the viewer). Now set out to go through the 500+ lines to find this particular button without proper comments. A sure treat for adrenaline junkies.
- World-class data analytics Not for world-class analytics. (Only Universe-class. :) )
- To rely solely on this app for home financial management Kind of obvious. Why would anyone rely on a home-finance app to do their home finances anyway?
- Tax returns No. Please not the t-word.
- Extremely secret alien finances Although the cryptography is definitely unbreakable (duh), I actually don't have much idea what I'm doing. So I would rather let the aliens do their work themselves or use an alternative app.
This program uses a weird but hopefully intuitive system (inspired from other Money Management Apps). Every transaction has 4 important descriptors. First, is the "From" section, which is one of the Accounts (Coming ahead). Next is the To section which is either a Payee or an Account. Next is a Category and the final is the Type, which is one of the three (Transfer, Minus, Plus).
All the assets and money accounts are modelled under Accounts. One would ideally have a Bank Account, Credit Card account, Cash Account and online wallets/cryptocurrency wallets as a part of his/her Accounts list. If you total the balance of these Accounts, you would get the current total wealth of the person, the sum total of their money. If you shuttle money between these accounts, (Example: Paying the Credit Card bill is Money goes from Bank Account to Credit Card Account), the Type Transfer is used for the transaction.
Payees are the entities which one would deal with financially, either paying money to or getting money from. If one pays moeny to a payee, the transaction Type is Minus, and it goes from one account to a payee. If one is paid some money, the From and To fields are still an account and a payee respectively, but the Type changes to Plus.
Categories are just a way to classify transactions. Each transaction can be labelled with a category irrespective of all other fields. For example, a transfer modelling the payment of Credit Card Bills can be labelled with a category "bills". A Minus transaction from Paypal to Amazon to buy a phone can be labelled with the category "electronics", and so on.
There is no standard way to model your finances. This is just a rough guide. Feel free to create whatever system suits you the best.
To run this app, navigate to the folder containing the script files and enter in the console python homeFinance.py <dbname> with a <dbname> if you want to open an already existing databse or without that to create a new database. It will ask for the password and if successful, will open the GUI in the former case, or will prompt for the name of the new database in the latter case. Either way, you need to be replying in console.
There are currently 7 tabs in the GUI. The first one is to add new accounts (currently start with zero opening balance. You might need a pseudo past-dated transaction to add balance, past-dated enough to never interfere with the analysis date-ranges), payees, categories or add a new transaction. The options are self explanatory and the submit buitton provides feedback if the transaction was successfully added or if the entered data failed to validate (date or the amount). You can also delete accounts/payees/categories but that will not remove the transactions and the only way to view them in the viewer is to select all the columns in all the lists.
Next is the viewer. It allows filtering based on what all is selected. Press refresh to load. Select everything to display all transactions, even for the categories/payees now deleted and now not displayed inthe filter lists. Only the transactions within the date range will be shown. Additionally, there is an option now to delete transactions based on their SerialIDs. Be carefult since this is irreversible, and is currently experimental.
Next is the Numeric Analysis tab. Displays almost evrything you might want to know as a summary of transactions within a date range. Opening balance refers to the sum total of the transactions happening before the starting date of the analysis range as of now, and hence, currently, you can actually 'open' an account by adding a backdated Plus entry and always starting analysis after the date of this entry. Colors indicate whether the amount is negative or above zero.
Next is the Graphical Analysis tab. The drill is the same. Keep a date-range specified. Press the button of the graph-numbers to display different graphs. There is a button on the right of the range, which decides the focus on Plus/Stacked or focus on Minus/Stacked or .../Unstacked, which is important for subplot 3 in graph number 1,2,3. It toggles on being pressed, and to refresh, press the desired graph button again. In graphs 1,2,3 there are two pie charts showing the distribution of money inflow and outflow according to categories, payees and accounts. The third subplot in all of these shows a weekly breakdown of that week's Minus (or Plus, depending upon the button state) transactions belonging to different categories/payees/accounts. It is a 100% stacked area plot (as it is sometimes called) or a simple stacked area plot depending on the toggle-button. Allows you to see how the contribution of different categories/payees/accounts change over time. Graph 4 shows the trend of the account balance over time, and the total balance (the home finance version of "Net worth"). Graph 5 has all weird stuff and analysis which is extremely useful and superb and so nice and all. :D
Next is the Export/Import tab. It allows exporting the dataset as a csv and all the accounts/categories/payees as a text file. The default file names are already loaded in the respective entry boxes. On pressing the export button, the files will be created, or the relevant error message shown. For import, you can load from multiple files, files of two kind. One loads the accounts/categories/payees from a text file with comma separated values and newline-separated accounts/payees/categories, and another from a csv (importing the transactions). After loading each of these kinds of files (you can load only the csv too), you will have an updated count of how many transactions/accounts/payees/categories are imported. Repeatedly pressing the import files button will create duplicates. "Reset" to start afresh. Otherwise press the main import button to create the new database, encrypted by default with the password abcde12345.
Next is the Changing password tab. Quite self-explanatory. You need to save the database on quitting for the new password to be used.
Final tab is the about-the-app tab. Again, self-explanatory.
On quitting the option of saving shall come up in the console. Please do not skip this. Press 'y' and enter to save. Will require your password (I do not know why this feature is there. Seemed cool when I added it.).
- (0-indexed, as it should be) Code cleanup for readability
and code comments Graphical Analysis tab(yes, I actually did it)Export database as csvChange Password- Save button in the UI and auto-save
Support for adding opening balance when adding a new Account (As of now, add a backdated Plus entry and always start analysis after the date of this entry)- Better Documentation
and updated readme
Import database dataDelete transactions- Budget setup and compare
- Different currencies
- UI-based password entry
- Cryptography (Cool Stuff, I know)
- Pandas
- Numpy
- Matplotlib
- base64, os, sys, tkinter, time, getpass (Usually included as the standard python library)