These are projects posted by the students of Dr. Gove Allen at Brigham Young University. These students have taken one semester-long course on VBA and generally have had no prior programming experience

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Moneytrackin Expense Reports

Moneytrackin is a self-described “free online tool to regain control of your financial life.” Through the organization’s website at www.moneytrackin.com, users can access a simple but elegant piece of software that allows for the tracking of individual inflows and outflows of cash. Moneytrackin also offers a free iPhone app, which I have been using to track all my income and expenses since September of 2008. Unlike popular sites like www.mint.com, Moneytrackin is entirely user-controlled and does not link to bank accounts. I enjoy this feature for two reasons: (1) it gives me the ability to specifically track cash-based transactions, and (2) it gives me the power to judgmentally classify each transaction.

The downside of this style of budgeting tool is the significant investment in time and labor. Each month for the past two years, I have had to spend approximately 30 minutes a month to manually transfer my data from Moneytrackin into a spreadsheet, classify each transaction into an expense category, and format the data. I have written a program that will request a date from the user and automatically download that month’s list of transactions to Excel. The program then formats the transaction data and allows the user to classify each transaction into a set of specified expense categories (a set of default expense categories is also provided). My program also allows the user to build a bar graph or a pie chart from the data, in order to see how money was allocated among different expense categories.

Click here for the write-up about my project

Click here for the Excel workbook

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