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Expense Tracker

Build a simple expense tracker to manage your finances.

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Build a simple expense tracker application to manage your finances. The application should allow users to add, delete, and view their expenses. The application should also provide a summary of the expenses.

Requirements

Application should run from the command line and should have the following features:

  • Users can add an expense with a description and amount.

  • Users can update an expense.

  • Users can delete an expense.

  • Users can view all expenses.

  • Users can view a summary of all expenses.

  • Users can view a summary of expenses for a specific month (of current year).

Here are some additional features that you can add to the application:

  • Add expense categories and allow users to filter expenses by category.

  • Allow users to set a budget for each month and show a warning when the user exceeds the budget.

  • Allow users to export expenses to a CSV file.

The list of commands and their expected output is shown below:

bash
$ expense-tracker add --description "Lunch" --amount 20# Expense added successfully (ID: 1)$ expense-tracker add --description "Dinner" --amount 10# Expense added successfully (ID: 2)$ expense-tracker list# ID  Date       Description  Amount# 1   2024-08-06  Lunch        $20# 2   2024-08-06  Dinner       $10$ expense-tracker summary# Total expenses: $30$ expense-tracker delete --id 2# Expense deleted successfully$ expense-tracker summary# Total expenses: $20$ expense-tracker summary --month 8# Total expenses for August: $20

Implementation

You can implement the application using any programming language of your choice. Here are some suggestions:

  • Use any programming language for any available module for parsing command arguments (e.g. python with the argparse, node.js with commander etc).

  • Use a simple text file to store the expenses data. You can use JSON, CSV, or any other format to store the data.

  • Add error handling to handle invalid inputs and edge cases (e.g. negative amounts, non-existent expense IDs, etc).

  • Use functions to modularize the code and make it easier to test and maintain.

This project idea is a great way to practice your logic building skills and learn how to interact with the filesystem using a CLI application. It will also help you understand how to manage data and provide useful information to users in a structured way.