Finance Tracker

A smart finance app that tracks spending, gives insights, and teaches you how to manage money better.

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Inspiration

This project was inspired by a common problem: managing personal finances is difficult, especially for students and young adults. Most tools either focus only on tracking or are too complex to use daily. As part of the challenge to build a solution with real-world impact, we wanted to create something simple, practical, and educational - a tool that not only tracks money but helps users understand it.

What it does

Our Finance Tracker is a web app that allows users to:

  • Track expenses and income
  • Monitor subscriptions
  • View spending insights
  • Learn financial concepts through short lessons and quizzes
  • A fun benchmark tool to practice your skills

It also provides smart feedback, such as:

  • “You are overspending in X category”
  • “Good job saving Y%” This transforms raw data into meaningful guidance.

How we built it

We built the project using:

  • Python (Flask) for backend logic and routing
  • SQLite for the database
  • HTML, CSS, and Jinja for the frontend
  • Chart.js for visualising spending data

We developed the app step by step, starting with core tracking features and then adding insights and a learning system.

We also implemented simple financial calculations, for example: $$ \text{Savings Rate} = \frac{\text{Income} - \text{Expenses}}{\text{Income}} \times 100\% $$

Challenges we ran into

We faced several technical challenges during development:

  • Fixing form submission issues and broken routes
  • Debugging template errors (e.g. missing keys, loop issues)
  • Keeping data consistent across different features
  • Maintaining a consistent UI design across all pages

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Building a full-stack application from scratch
  • Creating a clean, consistent UI across all pages
  • Successfully integrating tracking, insights, and learning into one product
  • Turning financial data into actionable feedback
    Most importantly, we created something that feels like a real, usable product.

What we learned

Through this project, we learned:

  • Debugging real-world application issues
  • The importance of UX and design consistency
    We also learned how to think beyond coding and focus on user behaviour.

What's next for Finance Tracker

In the future, we would like to:

  • Improve the quiz and learning system
  • Introduce goals and budgeting features
  • connect to real financial data APIs
  • Improve benchmark
    Our goal is to turn this into a more complete personal finance assistant.
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