/rolling-budget

Command-line tools to manage your personal budget from CSV input.

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

Personal Rolling Budget

This is a command-line based tool that can compute how much you spend during the last four weeks on a rolling basis, instead of just taking the current month. While this approach has some drawbacks (for example, it makes it harder to budget big expenses), it allows to precisely control your budget, as it always show what you have spent in the last 4 weeks. That way, you don't have to be at the end of the month to see that you've spent too much. You can control your spending every day precisely.

The tools bases on CSV data, so this could be fed by a Dropbox-hosted file as well. An example to the CSV data will be delivered as a template.

The code is still being finalized for release. Keep watching and thanks for your interest.

Run The tool

Update the filename of expenses2016.csv so that it reflects the current year and month (expensesYYYYMM.csv). Also update the dates inside the file so they are no longer than 28 days old.

0> python budget.py
Reporting budget use from the last running 4 weeks compared to the set budget

Processing expenses201610.csv... ✓

Compute budget...
Expenses from last 4 weeks of 90.0EUR

Known Limitations

  • It operates on a four week basis, not on a full month.
  • It only works with EURO currency so far.
  • No changeable budget limit to check against.