Improve our financial tracker

[velixko]

So i thought about ways how we could improve our current financial tracker.

I looked at some other financial trackers and compared them to our project.

Here are some useful features other trackers have and some of my own ideas that we could add:

• Most financial trackers allow you to enter a monthly budget (your salary or other revenues)

• Separating monthly (recurring) and discretionary expenses
  -by tracking your recurring expenses (like rent and gym membership) separately, you get to know how much "spendable" money you got left every month

• Being able to set a limit that you don't want to exceed for every single category
  -for example: you don't wanna spend more than 200€ for online shopping
  -it's a useful feature that can help you to save money and we could track how many limits you exceeded each month

• Summarize your expenses in a specific time frame
  -for example: how much did i spend in the last 6 months
  -we could also add how many times you exceeded which category limit in that time frame. For example: You spend too much money on online shopping in 3 of the last 6 months.

• Calculate your credit score
  -not that important for us imo but could be a nice feature if we make an app out of it for other people to use

• Separate between cash and card payments
  -we could find out trends of spending habits, like if you spend your money more careful when you pay with card instead of cash

Let me know what features you think we should add and maybe you also got some ideas yourself. 😄

[till-teb]

["Separating monthly (recurring) and discretionary expenses
-by tracking your recurring expenses (like rent and gym membership) separately, you get to know how much "spendable" money you got left every"]

|--> Uhhh, I really love that idea. Thats a really good
|--> I think we can implement this feature by giving our dataset a new coloum. `data.[regular_expense] = [0 , 1]

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["Being able to set a limit that you don't want to exceed for every single category
-for example: you don't wanna spend more than 200€ for online shopping
-it's a useful feature that can help you to save money and we could track how many limits you exceeded each month"]

|--> Also a really great feature to improve our usability.
|--> For my opinion we could implement that feature by giving the user the possibility to choose if he wants to set a limit for a specific expense
|--> So for the feature implementing I would suggest to add another column data[set_limit] = [0, 1] if set_limit() is set to 1, the also new column data[limit_value] = int(input( set limit:) set the value of the expense-limit.

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["Summarize your expenses in a specific time frame
-for example: how much did i spend in the last 6 months
-we could also add how many times you exceeded which category limit in that time frame. For example: You spend too much money on online shopping in 3 of the last 6 months.]"

|--> this feature is great as well but the functionality is already planed for the statistics function I mean, for me this is pretty much the definition of our statistic function right? :)

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Last One:

["Separate between cash and card payments
-we could find out trends of spending habits, like if you spend your money more careful when you pay with card instead of cash"]

|--> I do not have an idea how this will tell us something important about our spend-money-habits. May you explain that implementation more detailed. only if you have more ideas. if not that fine as well :)

|--> the problem for me is, that now a days every convenience store is offering you the card payment right? If I can pay by card my croissant or my late night beer at the kiosk what should that column then tells me exactly @velixko :) ?

All in one, great ideas really thank you for that @velixko 👍

[adhamarif]

I really like point number 3, because later it will be helpful to integrate with our savings tracker.

For point number 5, it is really cool if we could make this feature. But first we need to figure out how should we calculate the score. Luckily we have importance score in our module. Maybe that could help us.

Other than that, I find your ideas really interesting. We could actually use all your ideas if we have enough time.

My suggestion would be one step at a time. We should have a first version program running first, and then later we could add these features to make our app more interesting.

[l4nz8]

• Points 1 to 3 have been implemented in the meantime or are still being implemented.
• The fourth point is a good idea for an additional feature, but I wouldn't recommend implementing it for now, as our project is more of a financial analysis tool than an expense management tool if we want to implement an ML model.
• The fifth point is also still being worked on and will be added at the end.
• The sixth point I would also rather suggest as an extra feature especially if we still have time to add it.
• For the last point we would have to introduce an extra label to represent this in another graph, but it's not a bad idea.