Create a Personal Expense Tracker

Challenge Difficulty: Hard | Estimated completion time: ~3-5 hours

Create a personal expense tracker to manage your finances efficiently.

Here’s an example:

The modern way to manage your money - Monarch

Monarch makes it easy to track all of your accounts, optimize your spending, analyze your investments, and create a financial plan to achieve your goals.

This project is great practice for data handling.

If you want to take it to the next level, integrate a third-party service like Plaid to get financial information.

Steps to Get Started

1. Define the Functionality

Determine what features your expense tracker will include.

Start with essential functions like logging daily income and expenses. Consider how users will categorize their transactions (e.g., food, utilities, entertainment).

2. Choose your Tech Stack

This is all on you.

If you’re not sure, then start with the classic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

If you’re more experienced, React/NextJS.

3. Implement some basic features

Develop features for adding, removing, and viewing transactions. Ensure your UI is user-friendly and data presentation is clear.

Integrate Plaid’s API to fetch real-time financial data from users’ bank accounts, which can auto-populate the expense logs.

4. Implement some advanced features

Implement categorization for expenses to help users track their spending patterns.

Create graphical reports using a library like Chart.js to visualize spending trends and financial forecasts.

Explore adding features like budget alerts, where users can set budget limits for different categories and receive notifications when nearing these limits.

Go crazy with some AI. Add a smart AI bot that’ll recommend finance tips to users based off their information.

Why this project?

Building a personal expense tracker with Plaid integration teaches you about handling sensitive data, working with APIs, and developing a full-stack application.

It’s a practical project that combines technical challenges with real-world utility, perfect for enhancing your portfolio and understanding modern web development practices.