Money Tracker

Analysing my expenses for a reality check.

21 October 2021#development
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We conducted a bank account transactions inspection last month and analysed our spending habits. Using a Google spreadsheet template, I manually entered each transaction to generate a report. Surprisingly, I spent the most on the bike...

While this insight is crucial for financial decisions, it's tedious to input rows every month. With 30 transactions per month, that's at least 360 transactions to track annually.

Fortunately, ANZ and ASB online banking offer CSV export features. Although I searched for an existing application to import these transactions, none met my requirements. The manual procedures and inconsistencies in column formatting hindered the process.

As usual, I decided to create a web-based system for automation. Here are the requirements:

  1. Transaction importer for ANZ Debit, ANZ Credit Card, ASB Debit, and General CSV.
  2. Assign categories (e.g., Food, Rent, Bike, Insurance, Salary) to each transaction.
  3. Assign multiple tags (e.g., Countdown, K-Mart, Lazada) to each transaction.
  4. Automatically assign categories and tags based on the previous month's transactions during import.
  5. Generate graphs and reports for each month, seeking advice on this aspect.