Kelly and I were talking this weekend about budgets, and why they were so hard to make. Primarily the problem is that budgets attempt to impose a limit on certain types of spending, and at the same time, people generally don’t have a very clear picture of where their money is going.
As a fun experiment, we talked about creating a small web application to help people figure out where their money goes. The key factor to drive it would be simplicity and ease of use. Using Rails it came together pretty quickly over the weekend and I’ve already started using it.
The key features:
- Completely web based
- In place editing for all fields
- Track your expenses by month
- Tag your expenses by category
- Generate reports at any time for the current month
- Free to use
To get started, head over to Glued To My Money and register for an account.
It’s still pretty basic, but it should work fairly well. Here’s what I would like to do in the near future:
- Add export to CSV / Excel feature
- Add SSL to the web server
- Integrate AmCharts to visualize spending trends
If you sign up and enjoy it (or not), please let me know . I would love feedback.
Screenshots:
not to ruin your day but check out mint.com—amazing!
Hah, yeah funny story about mint. I signed up for an account and then had a mini freak-out paranoia session about my credentials being stolen and then following that, my money as well. I will definitely be signing up for a mint account in the future.
One could say that taking a daily involvement with your finances (e.g. entering in receipts and categorizing them) would ultimately give you more awareness of where your money is going as well as more restraint, but my ~$200/mo bowling cost would apparently disagree :)