What I’ve Been Working On…

Ta-da~~ finally revealing what I’ve been making myself work on every night after work…  my own personal accounting software! *phew* In fact, this is a project that I embarked on about 5 years ago, but I got bored and after reformatting my computer, etc, I just never worked on it until I got the hankering to do so either late last year or early this year.

I started searching for my source code so I could continue working on it… but sad to say that I could only find the logon page codes! As you can see from the link on top, I had already an output screen and evidently – some method to input transactions. It was soooo easy to just say, “Screw this, I’ll go back to pen and paper” (Which is how I do my own personal finances…), but I had to persevere. Mainly because my little notebook is almost finished, and I’m getting lazy to keep writing everything down. Plus, I like the idea of being able to query out the transactions (data mining) and really getting to know what I’m spending my money on. It’s quite tedious to trawl through your own notebook to track back where the expenses are going!

I didn’t even have the database scripts to recreate all the tables again, even though I remember distinctly telling myself, “Ok, you got to keep the scripts in a text file so that next time when you want to install a new copy in another machine, you can just trigger all the queries in one go.” What the heck! Very demotivating, but at the same time, I told myself, THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO REDO EVERYTHING YOU FELT WAS “NOT QUITE RIGHT”! My previous program had a lot of hardcoding, and if it was to be installed in another person’s PC, everytime he / she wanted to add in a new transaction type, it would involve database command again. Even though it’s only myself using the software, I decided to make everything “parameterised”. Hahahhaa…

Ok, ok, no need to criticise on the GUI or whatever, I didn’t really concentrate on APPEARANCES as I was more concerned on getting the main modules working, and I’ve got quite a bit done so far. As I wrote on my Twitter, the rest are the bells and whistles. The changes I made from my 2007 copy :

a. paramaterisation of all the transaction codes (previously hardcoded )

b. able to add in new users (previously was for ME and ME alone)

c. able to add in different accounts (previously all finances is lumped in an “all in” category. Now can segregate on the balances in credit card (which bank cc as well), cash account, savings accounts, etc)

d. able to query transactions by date (previously would show you the balances for the month) and by account (as mentioned, last time was “all in”)

e. transaction screen able to put in default amounts so don’t have to keep keying in certain recurring expenses (e.g: gym, salary)

f. usage of menu-driven interaction instead of previous style which had a row of command buttons on the side (like a “frames” view)

I still have some other touch-ups to do :

a. maintainence of transaction codes (very low priority)

b. different type of reporting styles

c. set-up all the accounts that I have (this is the main priority actually)

d. my limits checking

Meanwhile, I achieved my target of completing this by end of the month so that I can resume keeping account of my expenses.. I had stopped for almost two months because there was heavy expenditure and I got demotivated. Hahahhaa! Anyway, I’ve had fun with this… after this, Tron asked me to build another small program for him, so I will probably work on that.

Oh yes, and the MySQL Workbench is sooo awesome! You don’t need to know ANYTHING on SQL and you can build your own tables and databases… how awesome is that? DBAs??… I shall replace you! Muwahhahaha….