💡 Smart Expense Tracker using Google Forms + Sheets + Colab

✨ Inspiration

Managing expenses is something most of us struggle with — especially students and families trying to track small but frequent transactions. Traditional apps can be complex or paid. So I thought, "Why not build something simple using tools we already use daily — Google Forms, Sheets, and Python?"

That’s how the idea of this Smart Expense Tracker was born — a project that automates expense recording and gives instant insights using familiar tools.

🔧 How I Built It

✅ Tools Used:

Google Forms – for users to submit their daily expenses easily
Google Sheets – acts as a database storing all form responses
Google Colab (Python + Pandas) – processes the sheet data and generates analytics like category totals and pie charts
HTML + CSS + JavaScript – to create a simple user-friendly web interface that fetches and displays the data live

🛠 Workflow:

Designed a Google Form with fields like Date, Category, Amount, Notes.
Responses were linked directly to a Google Sheet.
In Colab, I used pandas to read the sheet as a CSV using read_csv().
Performed data cleaning, grouping, and analysis using basic pandas functions.
Added visual insights like pie charts using matplotlib/plotly.
Created a basic web interface that displays form, shows submitted data from Sheets, and connects to Colab backend if needed.

📚 What I Learned

How to integrate Google Forms and Sheets with Python
Working with CSV data via URLs
Basic data analysis using pandas
Displaying live Google Sheets data in a web page using JS
Creating a clean, responsive UI using HTML, CSS, and Bootstrap

🚧 Challenges Faced

🔐 Initial struggle with Sheet access permissions (401 errors when not shared as “Anyone can view”)
🧠 Figuring out the right way to export Google Sheets as CSV
🔌 Issues with Colab authentication using gspread and service keys (later avoided by using public CSV instead)
🌐 Handling Colab network failures temporarily while fetching sheets