budgeting-app

Idea: Tracking a budget in a spreadsheet has never worked for me. First of all, it’s not accessible enough and it’s not easy to adjust. I want to create a web and eventually a mobile app that allows people to build/adjust a custom budget, and be able to record income/expenses on the go. The target audience is individuals and families as opposed to businesses, so it should be simple and easy to use.

Features:

• Be able to test out all functionality without creating an account

• Create an account

  • Users can create an account

  • The account should store minimal information about the person: username, password, name, email

• Edit your account

  • Change password, name, email

• Be able to create a budget

  • Create new spending categories

    • Ex. Rent, Groceries, Entertainment, etc.

  • Add existing categories

  • Users can create several budgets and they can select which one to use for a particular month or year

• Edit a budget

  • Edit categories

  • Add new categories

  • Remove categories

• Report expenses

  • Enter date, location, category, how paid for

  • Take a photo of a receipt and link it with an expenditure

• Edit expenses

• Report income

  • Enter date, source, category

• Edit income

• Be able to record assets - savings, checking, credit, cash

  • Not linked to actual accounts

  • Show only balance and transactions - can compare with your actual accounts (essentially like a checkbook)

  • Expenses/Income should be subtracted from/added to these assets

• Show a summary of the monthly budget and totals in each category so far

• Store a history of expected vs actual expenses/income so users can track how they are doing over an extended period of time

• Daily budget

• Weekly budget

• Yearly budget

• One-time budget (such as books, tuition)

• Can translate easily between daily, weekly, monthly, yearly budgets

Subset of Features to Implement:

• Be able to test out all functionality without creating an account

• Create an account

  • Users can create an account

  • The account should store minimal information about the person: username, password, name, email

• Edit your account

  • Change password, name, email

• Be able to create a budget

  • Create new categories with the amount the user specifies

  • Add existing categories

• Edit a budget

  • Edit categories

  • Add new categories

  • Remove categories

• Report expenses

  • Enter date, location, category, how paid for

  • Be able to take a photo of a receipt

• Edit expenses

• Report income

  • Enter date, source, category

• Edit income

• Show a summary of income and expenses

• Show a summary of the monthly budget and totals in each category so far

Architecture:

MEAN stack

Possibly use MySQL instead of MongoDB after we determine how to store the data and the operations to be performed on the data.