Introduction

This is an application to record assets, incomes and spendings on a monthly basis. The intended use case is as following. I am someone who works at a company and earns salary on a monthly basis. At the end of the month, before I embark on the next month I want to find out how much I will be left with after paying out all my debts. Me as a middle aged salary man, can have recurring debts such as mortgages, car loans, visa card loans. In my personal case, my spouse has her little business and she heavily uses my numerous visa cards. She pays me back what she used for her business but with some delay. So, nevertheless, at the end of the month it becomes important for me to find out if I have enough cash in my bank accounts to pay out all visa debts.

How to run the application

Later in the application architecture I will explain that the application consists of front end and back end. Back end serves Django Rest Framework based APIs, including endpoints for user registration and authentication. Frontend is React based and provides UI to interact with the backend. When you clone this repository front end comes embedded withing family_spending.static. Front end app was built and files were copied into that location. Some slight changes are made to index.html to make it work. More about that in later sections. Once you clone the app to your PC, ensure you have installed all libraries in requirements.txt (which assumes you have python3.9 and above), you can navigate to the application base folder and run below commands.

The application assumes that you will run it on docker and you will use postgres as database. If you don't have docker or postgres yet on your PC, then you can use sqlite simple database by uncommenting following lines in config.settings.py and commenting existing DATABASES config.

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3',
        'NAME': BASE_DIR / 'db.sqlite3',
    }
}

• Make migrations: Next you run makemigrations to generate instructions to create tables matching Data model definitions.

python manage.py makemigrations family_spending

• Then actually run migrate. This will also create user related tables

python manage.py migrate

• Finally start the server and you should be able to access the application by visiting http://localhost:8000

python manage.py runserver

Data model

Below are data models that I define as Django models (which are essentially database SQL tables)

• Business : the namme of the business. This application assumes that multiple users will benefit from it. Each user's assets, incomes and spendings will have to be isolated from other users. So we have this model to achieve that. Each of the afore mentioned db models will be tied to a Business model.

• Asset Account Name : These are my bank accounts. I have about three of them. At the end of the month each of my bank accounts will have some amount of cash in it. This model simply defines bank account names. Later I will use it as a foreign key of my Asset Account model, which will actually record the amount of money the associated bank account has at the end of the month

• Asset Account : this is the db model where I will record how much cash my bank account has as of certain date (which is usually the end of month). It will have asset_account_name foreign key pointing to Asset Account Name

• Income Name : the name of my income. Obviously, in my case Salary will be the first record in this table.

• Income : to record income amount as of certain date. It will have income_name as a foreign key pointing to Income Name db model.

• Spending Name : spending names. In my case, two house loans will go into it as first two records. Next, each of my visa card name will also be saved in this table.

• Spending : to record spending amount for each spending name as of month end. It will have spending_name as a foreign key pointing to Spending Name db model.

• Business Balance : This db model will sum up all assets, incomes and spendings, subtract debts from assets and report the net balance as of month end.