The Background Story

"If you can look at that (the excel sheet that lists all your monthly spending and investment) once a month. Anything you track will grow." - Noah Kagan, Chief Sumo at Sumo.com and AppSumo.com. Video link: youtu.be/t0-4v3YWAmQ?t=114

Even before I watched the video, I have started tracking my personal finance while I was still studying in Manchester as an undergraduate student.

I understood the basis of tracking things as it helps me to know where I am spending more than I should and how my investments are growing.

So, I tried to use a few apps previously but at the end of the day, I didn't find any app to my liking as every app has its own advantages and limitations.

But I ended up using Microsoft Excel, as many of us do.

However, doing it manually using Excel is tedious and boring to the core.

The features that I need in a personal finance app:

1. To track my spending based on my monthly cash flow, inflows and outflows.
2. To record my investment gains and to know its growth from time to time.
3. To show the different possibilities of my investment growing whenever I spend less and invest more, depending on the monthly spending I did in that month.
4. To see if my personal finance goals are on the right track and if not, how can I turn things around.
5. To be integrated with banks for automated spending tracking, not sure though if it is possible to do here in Malaysia.

So I decided to ask around:

This was tweeted when I first developed the app. Do notice the change in UI too!

I thought things will get easier once I got the cash flow transactions in but dear me...

With the help of a fellow Twitter friend @MarinJr21, I managed to get the database parameter sorted out.

Added a Lottie animation whenever your cash flow turns positive!

How's the progress now?

The home page visualizes the overall cash flow, goals and investment.

The investment page shows the inflows that are invested.

The cash flow page lists all the inflows and outflows. Here you can see the breakdown of inflows and outflows.

For every cash flow, there are recurring ones too.

What's next for the app?

For the sake of quick wins and also speeding things up for user trials, here are the pending features:

1. Recurring payments history - as part of the cash flow transaction. This data will be used to visualise the investment growth.

2. Investment gains history - the small gains which the user can update the investment record. This data will also be used as part of the investment growth graph.

3. The financial goal page - taking the investment data as inputs and to track if the user is on the right track to achieve his/her goals.

4. The onboarding user journey to record the user's current investment data, to set the user's financial goal and its allocation based on the cash flow transaction and current investment.

I think with these last 3 features and the onboarding user journey, the app should be good enough for the beta test to take place.

Let me know your thoughts on this #BuildinPublic project.

Do recommend me any personal finance app and their features that you link if you think I should incorporate them in this app too!