Budget Tracker

Inspiration

I got inspired by thinking about what people worry about daily, their budget! So many people spend without tracking their budget and end up wondering where all their money go at the end of the month. I realized this will always be an issue in today's society, so I created a budget tracker that does the math and tracks their spending into a nice format. I wanted something easy to use and not over-complicated for a complete level-0 coder.

What it does

It has a handful of options to track your budget. It allows you to add/view/edit/delete transactions. It has a current balance component that allows you to show how much you have left to spend from your initial desired budget that you enter in. Best thing yet, once you are done, you can save everything to a txt document and have it on your computer saved with all your budget details formatted.

How we built it

I completely built this using the terminal inside of my IDE, IntelliJ. I used Java to code all the components. The project consists of many user inputs and reading inputs to return some output. The options you get are ran through a switch statement that has each option within a case. It has a separate file for static variables like the tracker options that are named "MenuOptions." This allows so I can call these repetitive variables in a separate file to keep things more simple and organized. I used file packages to save and load files so it can work with saved data so when you exit the terminal you can always edit your previous saved data. You can save your new data once you are done using it, which the program saves it to a document onto your computer.

Challenges we ran into

It was difficult to get string formatting and editing right the first time. Editing something that is already entered takes careful touch-ups because I would have to make sure the new edits are getting copied back into the list correctly. Making sure the current balance updating values by turning the formatted strings into ints or doubles so it can perform math, and converting it back into strings to store back in the list was challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of the simplicity it is and how user-friendly it is. It is something I can see myself using where I enter everything I spent my money on from the month and saving the data and later on going back to edit it. It is a useful tool to automatically format and do the math for me instead of me manually doing the math and formatting myself.

What we learned

I learned that you have to have a strong error handling program when dealing with many user-input readings. Sometimes building something simple and user-friendly is highly appreciated by the masses. I learned putting things in another file to better organize and make it more readable is what makes collaboration possible and for debugging purposes as well.

What's next for Budget Tracker

An improvement can be implementing more options and more advanced options like goal-setting. Or putting it on a website so it is even more user friendly.

Built With

• file
• fileloading
• filereading
• filesaving
• inputreading
• intellij-idea
• java
• switchstatements
• terminal
• userinput