I believe that everyone should be on top of their personal finances. An easy way to track all your income and expenses is to use a budgeting tool. The general idea is to track all your transactions. Doing so helps to identify when money is being used in a manner that doesn’t provide any value. Doing this will help us to adhere to the general principle of spending less than what we earn. This is also called saving. Saving is very important to help when a rainy day comes or for buying homes or retiring in the future.
Thus, by tracking my transactions (using a tool called Firefly III) I can ensure that I end up saving and to be ready for a prosperous future. I rely on Firefly III to set fairly relaxed budgets. As I spend my money throughout the month I can then track how much money I have left in each respective budget. This allows me to adjust my spending behaviours as the month progresses. This also works for people earning variable incomes such as commissions based work or casual employment.
Normally one would manually enter each transaction into their Firefly III account, however, I coded an open source tool that will automatically update Firefly as each transaction is generated. The only caveat is that this tool only works with the Australian bank, UP.
Every time I make a transaction this is automatically put in Firefly. Firefly then gives me reports on how much I spend, where, and if, I am sticking in my budget.
Some screenshots below:
If you would like to use this connector program, please see this post with the details on how to install it.
See more documents on setting up Firefly HERE. For the link to UP click HERE and for the link to the UP API click HERE.
Feel free to drop me a comment with any feedback or questions.