Like most people who tend to DIY many parts of their lifes, i too pledge guilty of the program-your-own-tools sin.
For a long time i used to track my monthly finances in an ever growing excel sheet. Building functions which became more and more difficult over time. I knew i had to switch to an alternative sometime in the future and finally made the decision to program that solution myself.
Having a lot of experience with some tool doesn’t mean that it is the best. Thus i landed on my go-to-framework Laravel.
There should be no shame in building an UI that would deserve the austrian saying “schirch wie die nacht”. Anyway, i am pleased to say that it turend out at least 0.1% better than my absolute worst UI’s (there aren’t a lot either).
The main reason why i didn’t set up some other open source tool is i couldn’t find a tool that met my specific needs.
Most finance-trackers out there are geared towards multi-user/account support with very powerful features.
I need nothing of that nature.
All i want is a a simple spreadsheet replacement. I treat all my acocunts as one (including cash), and all I am interested in is calculating my monthly remains. Transfers between Accounts do not count towards outgoing transactions. A Recurrence Calculator to store recurring transactions. A special feature called “Therapy-Costs”, which represent Transactions that have a variing counts per month and that get a Reimbursement of some percentage (in this example provided by Social Security)
Could i have done less work and achieved the same result with my rusty spreadsheet? Absolutely.
Am i going to program more more stuff that should not have been programmed? Absolutely.
Thanks for reading. ~Coni