My wife has been learning about personal finance lately. Looking back at years of household spending, she concluded that our accounts were a blur: we could not say exactly how much came in or went out over a year. On impulse, she announced she wanted to start keeping books.
We tried some apps, but she found them annoying. So the idea became: use AI to build one. The stack was PHP 8.4 and MySQL. I set the direction and gave requirements; I did not write a single character of code (I couldn't). About six hours later, after roughly ten iterations, the app was nearly finished.
What changed in version 1.03
- Import and export CSV using selected conditions.
- Bookkeeping tags: one entry can have several tags, and one tag can point to many entries. This is more flexible than a two-level category tree.
- Pending payments and pending receipts, which better matches real life.
Core features
- Record income and expenses.
- Statistics by year, month, and category, with search-based statistics using notes.
- Multi-user support. To prevent junk data, the public front end has no registration entry.
- A separate admin back end.
Distinctive details
- Each user can have multiple ledgers, and each ledger gets its own data table.
- Categories inside each ledger can be added and deleted freely.
- Heartbeat detection means an account can be logged in on only one client at a time.
- Brute-force protection: after five failed password attempts, the account is forcibly locked.
A playful touch
- A registration mode uses a countdown to remind users to record their daily bookkeeping.
Still planned
- ~~Data import and export~~ — already updated.
- Data printing.
In the end, my wife praised it. That made me very happy.
A test account is available for anyone who wants to look around: test / 123456.
