(naming suggestions are welcome)
FinDash is an all-in-one personal financial dashboard, organizing things such as budget, expenses, savings, investments and more. The goal of this dashboard is to be able to get full visibility into ones whole financial state including analytics, to help navigate the complex financial world
The idea for the app came to me when we were looking to move apartment, and didn't really know what our budget was for rent. We were moving to a new city with higher rent prices so we in order to make an informed decision, we needed to map out our expenses and goals (we love to travel :) ) and see how everything would fit in given our set amount of income. This made me realize the difference between passive expense tracking and active budgeting.
Many personal finance apps mainly do one thing, which is expense tracking. Credit card and cash transactions are fed into the app and categorized, showing the user how much money was spent in each category. While this is extremely important, it is only half the picture. What is missing is are budgeting goals.
Ultimately, most of us have a fixed income, finite amount of resources we need to work with to achieve our goals. Whether it be to buy a house, go on a big trip, or just manage our spending behaviour, we have one pie we need to divide between all our wants. This faces us with choices we need to make, do we spend more on food or on entertainment? How much do we save? etc. These questions are not answered by expense tracking alone, but by budgeting, by giving each expense category a goal we want to reach. This is a main functionality of FinDash - the ability to set expense\savings goals and keep track of them.
As mentioned above, setting budgeting goals is very important to help us achieve the goals we want, while managing our available income. A major hurdle to overcome while striving to our goals are our own habits. While this isn't a habit changing app, it does provide a bunch of analytics to gain insights into our routines and habits, hopefully making it easier to find causes and change towards the path we want to take.
- Create expense categories (e.g. bills, medical, rent, going out etc.) with expense goals to define a budget.
- Import CSV files from you bank and credit card companies
- Keep track of expense categories throughout the month
- Look at analysis of your historical data to see behavioural trends
The current implementation uses Plotly Dash as a front end and parquet files as the DB to save financial transaction data. Future implementation might move to a proper SQL DB, depending on the needs.